'Moj Darko nestao je kad su mu bile dvije godine. Našli su samo crveni tricikl. Trag vodi u Udine'
Article from march 2024 (translated with google translate so it mights not be perfect)
'My Darko disappeared when he was two years old. They found only a red tricycle. The trail leads to Udine'
The boy Darko Stančević was two years and eight months old when he disappeared in Mostar in 1982. He was playing in front of the house. 'I only went inside to pour water into the sauerkraut tubs. When I came back, he was gone,' said the grandmother
A storm is brewing. In the
Stancevic family from Mostar , the father and mother are at work, there is some kind of inventory in the hotel where they work. In
Bakina Luka Street , in a one-story house with a large yard, grandmother
Mara Jurić looks after her grandson Darko. He is two years and eight months old.
He has beautiful blue eyes and blonde hair. He and grandma Mara have their daily ritual, there are neighbors' houses around, so she and Darko go to the neighbor's house for coffee, and he goes for a ride on his new, red tricycle. Mom and Dad bought it for him for his birthday. After drinking the coffee, they return home.
Darko is in front of the house, playing and riding around on a tricycle until rain starts to fall. At one point, grandma entered the house and remembered that she had to pour water into the sauerkraut tubs. By the time she does that, maybe a minute will pass. Certainly not more than four or five. Go outside again. But...
Darka - no! She walks around the house, looks where the boy has hidden and panics. He is nowhere! He runs to the neighbor, he's not even there. Neither in the second nor in the third. No one saw him, Darko simply disappeared. It starts to rain and the other children in the street scattered before the downpour. Nobody saw anything, they say. How is that possible? Where is the boy?!
Bakina Luka is a long street where there is very little traffic, which makes the whole story even stranger. Soon, on the rocks, towards the Neretva River, they find Darko's red tricycle. It is exactly 238 meters from the house to the place where the tricycle was found. But there is no sign of him.
At the time of his disappearance, the boy was wearing brown velvet suspenders and a red sweater. He didn't have a jacket because, as we said, it's was very warm for this time of year...
They search with kayaks the entire
Neretva as far as
Metković , but nothing. The family does not believe that Darko fell into the river anyway, because there is a long layer of large stones that separates the bank from the river, it would have been impossible for the two-year-old to cross it on his own.
That day, the sniffer dogs and most of the policemen were reassigned somewhere. It will take 24 hours before the then militiamen even show up at the door of the Stancevic family. Well, twice as much before the police take the boy's disappearance seriously. The militia does an unimaginably sloppy job. The case of the disappearance of the boy Darko Stančević is assigned to a certain inspector Rajić.
"Today it is unthinkable, but for example... The red tricycle was not exempted as evidence at all, but was returned to the family and I rode it as a little girl. Well then, it was the most normal thing for the militia at that time for my mother, who comes to the station to ask if there is anything new about her child's disappearance, for the inspector to say: "I thought you came to confess what you did..." Or to tell my grandfather : "Dude, shut up! Why didn't you keep him..." Or that ten years ago, when I went to ask to see Darko's file, you realized that the police in Mostar didn't have it at all. They lost him. Disappeared! We had to report Darko's disappearance again, start the whole case anew "
Darjana Jakupović , born Stančević, Darko's sister, who has taken on all the involvement in the search for her brother in recent years, tells us
Grandma died in grief, parents still carry a scar on their souls. Darjana was born two years after her brother's disappearance and does not want to surrender. As long as there is even the slightest hope that she will find out what happened on December 21 around 10 a.m. in Mostar's Bakina Luka street, she says, she will look for her brother. But the details of the disastrous investigation when it was most important, at the very beginning, in December 1982 and in the months after, make the job very difficult today. They make the search practically impossible.
"For example, there was a Lada parked at the bottom of the street that morning when Darko disappeared. Several neighbors saw it. They remembered it because it was not a busy street at all. It looked like it had a flat tire or something. It was the color of ivory. The police knew all this, and they told the parents that they had talked to these people, that they had checked on them. However, they never did. We were told this by the inspector who was subsequently assigned the case and who found nothing about it in the file, which would later disappear. He told us: "They only told you that to calm you down". The whole process of the investigation, before it even got into the hands of that man, was very strange to say the least, but there was nothing he could do" Darjana Jakupović, who still lives in Mostar, tells us.
In the following years, in the eighties, nineties and even in the 2000s, the family will spend a huge amount of money on the search. Private detectives, psychics... They will have to finance everything themselves because there was no help from the institutions.
(Snip)
She says that they were also in contact with Croatian psychics, for example Ivo Trobok in Orebić on Pelješac .
"He also cooperated with the police. He asked for dates of birth, Darko's as well ! (..) And based on his drawings, he told us that Darko is alive, that he lives somewhere abroad, that there is a church on the right at an intersection, and behind the church is his first house. That he lives there " Darjana tells us and continues:
"We also received information from an acquaintance, who worked in
Udine , that he saw a man there who looked remarkably like my father. We hired a private detective. We went there, sat on the side and waited for that man to appear. When he left the building, my mother and I were in shock! Not because of looks, but figure, way of walking. Same as dad. We sat down with this man, told him our doubts. We begged him to agree to the DNA. But he didn't want to..."
Darjana found out through a private detective that the family had moved to Udine right around the time Darko disappeared in the eighties. They are supposedly from
Albania . She begged the man for photos when he was little, but three or four years old, so that he could compare them with the Darks, however, he brought pictures when he was one or two years old. She couldn't tell him why those photos didn't tell her much. Namely, the private detective had revealed to them that this family had lost a child right at the beginning of the eighties. The boy was Darko's age...
The man from Udin was Darko's age, but he soon lost contact with the Mostar family. And Italian law says that after the age of 27, he cannot be forced to take a DNA test, even if Interpol requests it. Darjana noticed one incredible, perhaps completely coincidental detail in Udine. But still...
Just as the psychic from Orebić said - an Italian whom she still suspects could be her brother lives near the intersection, immediately to the right is the church, in the first house behind...
(Snip)
New photo posted inside the article
