Infobrcko internet portal "taken down" from Brcko District Government address

Hacking attacks that "took down" the information portal "infobrcko" almost three years ago came from the address of the Government of Brcko District of BiH, but no one has yet been held accountable for this unprecedented scandal, writes the BiH news agency Patria (NAP).

The stifling of freedom of expression of internet portals in BiH began much earlier than the raid by the RS Ministry of Internal Affairs police on the Klix editorial office at the end of last year, when computers and phones were confiscated from journalists and editors of this portal due to the publication of information about political malversations in RS.

Sead Šadić, founder of the infobrcko portal, said in an interview for Patria that the journalists of this media outlet were among the first in BiH to feel the stifling of freedom of expression, but that even three years later, the authorities have not found the perpetrator who blocked the portal's operation and by whose order. The scandal is more serious given the fact that the hacking attacks on this portal, which lasted a total of six days in March and April 2012, were carried out, among other things, from an internet address owned by the Government of Brcko District, as the investigation showed.

- That is incomprehensible. Someone used the Government's address, and the Prosecutor's Office cannot trace who did it even almost three years after the incident - Šadić told NAP.

- The Brcko District Prosecutor's Office stated that the case is no longer within their jurisdiction, and they have handed it over to the Cantonal Prosecutor's Office in Sarajevo.

Šadić does not want to claim that the attacks on the portal were politically motivated, but, he says, if one of the attacks came from the IP address of the Brcko District Government, then there is no reason to dismiss that option either, writes Patria.