Vladimir Mitrić, a Serbian journalist, has always been drawn towards unearthing the darker side of life: human and drug smuggling; war crimes; corrupt politicians, war profiteers, tycoons and murders shielded by state institutions—the kind of work that makes enemies.

In 2005, Mitrić was investigating drug trafficking along the Drina River, a 346 kilometer stretch of water that forms much of the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. On September 12, he was entering his home in Šabac, western Serbia, when a former policeman attacked him with a baseball bat on his doorstep, striking him more than 20 times on the head, shoulders, and back before calmly walking away. The incident took place just meters away from a coffee shop filled with patrons. Many were off-duty policemen; none responded to Mitrić’s pleas for help.

When Mitrić approached the police in 2004 on how investigations into three previous incidents in which his car was damaged were going, the head of the police in his hometown responded: “What can you do, you have a difficult profession.”

Since then, Mitrić—who had been the victim of several other attacks before the September incident—has lived with police protection, although it is limited to the police precinct in Šabac. His assailant received a one-year prison sentence: it was overturned before it reached appeal due to a general amnesty.

Report by Human Rights Watch