Exposed by Technological Backwardness: RS Ministry of Interior Intelligence Officers Fabricated Footage of the "Attack" on Vučić

The confessions of two Serbian Ministry of Interior police officers, Milan Dumanović and Mladen Trbović, that they were forced to attend the commemoration in Potočari have shed new light on the alleged attack on Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić in Srebrenica. This case has demonstrated how fragile the fabrications aimed at inciting new conflicts between Bosniaks and Serbs can be, writes the Patria news agency.

Milan Dumanović admitted that he was on a secret mission in Potočari when the attack on Aleksandar Vučić occurred. Dumanović reveals that he was in the crowd when the attack began, stating that he was at that location even before it was known that Vučić would walk through the people.

– When we arrived in Srebrenica, we came across the head of the Prime Minister's security detail from the "Cobras". He did not know we had come, nor did we receive official instructions on what we were supposed to do and on what basis. At that time, 17 officers from the secret surveillance service were sent. He was surprised. He asked us what we were doing in Srebrenica. We told him we had come on the verbal order of Ivan Ristić, the head of the cabinet of Minister Nebojša Stefanović. My task was to stand in the crowd and secretly record. Goran Nešić issued that order to me, Dumanović states.

He adds that his recordings were unusable due to outdated equipment.

– Ristić later came to my office to see what I had recorded. He entered arrogantly in shorts and slippers and said the recordings were worthless. No one cared that we could all have lost our heads if something had gone wrong, he states.

Whether the recordings were unusable is the question. It is obvious that someone did not need the truth about what happened at the commemoration in Potočari. Why were Dumanović's recordings not "good enough"?      

In the spring of 2015, a group from the RS Ministry of Interior went on a short course in various intelligence skills in Israel and returned in July 2015. Part of the group was trained to work on sophisticated surveillance and wiretapping equipment. This involved the Prevention Department, which has extensive technical equipment and mobile vehicles to prevent their location and identification of their surveillance activities.

Allegedly, surveillance equipment was purchased from the German company "Rhode and Schwartz" from Munich. The stationary part of the equipment is located in Banja Luka, while the "in suitcases" part covers the entire BiH.

As part of the course in Israel, it was said that one part of the team was trained to work on video materials and the possibilities of editing and reconstructing footage. It was something like an ordinary Photoshop program for computer animation, with a version for more complex operations on video materials. 

Practically, the RS formed its own "state security" within the Administration for the Fight against Terrorism and Extremism, whose center is in Banja Luka. This is essentially a semi-private state security, which is not regulated by the Dayton Agreement. 

Many were surprised when Vučić, after the incident in Potočari, stated at a press conference in Belgrade (we paraphrase): "This footage you have seen is nothing compared to what you will see in the footage in the coming days."

How did the Prime Minister know that there were some new "more terrifying" recordings "that would be shown in the coming days"? It can be concluded that Vučić was informed that the Banja Luka team would reconstruct and edit new details into the existing footage.

The very next day, in Belgrade media, Tešnjak Almir Merdić was 'crucified' as the organizer of the attack, although in some footage he can be seen recording the event with his amateur camera the entire time.    

As the Prime Minister prophesied, so it happened. The stones flying towards his head increased with each recording. In the end, it all turned into a rain of stones flying towards Vučić's head. The editors went so far that they did not even consider the size of the stones, so finally, a stone appeared above the Prime Minister's head that would have led to a total reconstruction of the Government of Serbia.

There is no laboratory in the region for such cases that would detect direct manipulation of video recordings. As far as is known, SIPA has not yet dealt with examining the authenticity of the footage from Potočari. It is known that in the West there are laboratories for testing the originality of video recordings as evidence, the most famous being in Germany and the Netherlands.

Laboratories work on the principle of examining the speed of the recording. Namely, any editing or addition from the side is noticeable due to the different speed of movement of persons. Laboratories are able to detect differences that are impossible to see with the naked eye. The edits in the footage from Potočari were done completely amateurishly and unprofessionally, so completely unnatural movements of certain persons throwing themselves at Vučić and his entourage could be observed with the naked eye.

These persons are mostly regularly turned with their backs to the cameras and evidently inserted into the footage. In poor attempts at editing, a recording was constructed in which one of the young men with a green beret on his head grabs someone from Vučić's entourage. The editors made a mistake again because it is visible that the young man's forearm is unnaturally and at least three times larger than his other forearm.

In Tito's time, in the distant eighties, the affair with the first video recordings occurred. And immediately, the then Supreme Court of Yugoslavia indicated that this could not be credible evidence for any trials. As it was then, so it remains to this day. Video material is, for every court in the world, only an indication, but not evidence. In this case, too, it turns out to be reasonable and accurate.       

After all this, we can say that we witnessed an attempt to apply revolutionary technology in the primitive and mountainous Balkans. Of course, the technology immediately collapsed in this, for it, completely inhospitable and backward area.