Pawns in a drug war
On October 1 last year, two months before the restaurant shooting, an explosion ripped through an apartment in downtown Belgrade, sending bits of concrete, furniture and glass hurtling across the street.
Amid the debris of the third-floor apartment, police found the body of a young man.
He was eventually identified as a 21-year-old citizen of North Macedonia called Martin Sipkovski, a student, model and former handball player for the Skopje club Vardar.
Sipkovski had been under house arrest in Skopje while on trial for involvement in attempted murder. He skipped the country and entered Serbia illegally the week before the explosion.
The blast was caused by around 1.5 kilograms of PETN, one of the most powerful explosives around. Experts say 100 grams is enough to destroy a car.
Police say Sipkovski had been given the explosives the day before, with the intention of killing 23-year-old Tadija Pantic, a leader of the Partizan hooligan group who had ties to a faction of the powerful Kavac Montenegrin crime gang.
Since 2015, dozens of people have been killed in a war between the Kavac and Skaljari clans, which trace their roots to two neighbourhoods of the Montenegrin coastal town of Kotor.
Their feud erupted after 200 kilograms of cocaine vanished from an apartment in the Spanish city of Valencia. The violence quickly went global, claiming victims in Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey, Austria, Greece, Spain and other countries.
Police believe Sipkovski triggered the explosives accidentally. His father said he was a victim of “circumstance and manipulation”.
“He went to Belgrade – frightened, confused, and, as we believe, deceived and abused by people who exploited his trust and fear,” Dejan Sipkovski wrote on Facebook. “Martin was not a perpetrator, but a victim of circumstance and manipulation that exceeded his experience and years.”
Hiring teenagers or young adults to carry out killing and other crimes has become standard practice for the likes of the Skaljari and Kavac clans.
“Professional killers are much more expensive, and there’s a big risk that if they’re arrested, they’ll turn prosecution witnesses,” said the police source.
Young, inexperienced would-be assassins make mistakes, he told BIRN, but it’s still cheaper and safer to hire them rather than send someone of higher rank or profile.
He recalled an attempted murder in the Montenegrin coastal town of Budva in August 2025, when a 19-year-old Macedonian national slipped and fell on wet tiles just as he fired at senior Skaljari member Marko Ljubisa Kan.
“It all happened by the hotel pool,” he said. “Ljubisa was on a lounger and the attacker approached him to within less than half a metre, but when he shot, he slipped on the wet tiles and fell. The bullets only grazed Ljubisa, and the attacker fled in the confusion that followed. Still, he was arrested within less than a year.”
