Just to expand on the Serbia angle, I feel like one issue people have with it is that the timeline seems too tight - the BBC’s Kosovo appeal, fronted by JD, took place just 20 days before she was killed. Imo, three weeks seems fairly ample time to plan an attack, but this assumes the Serbs only began making plans immediately after the appeal, when the reality is they could’ve been preparing for much longer.
The Yugoslav wars had been raging since 1991, and by the end of the 1990s the Serbs had lost the propaganda battle. International threats of military intervention were becoming increasingly powerful, the BBC reported in October 1998, prompting a furious response from officials in Serbia.
“In particular, the outspoken Deputy Prime Minister, Vojislav Seselj, accused the BBC of being part of a conspiracy to harden public opinion in the West, and warned of reprisals around the world if Nato forces attacked Serbia.
“A Serb television report described the BBC accounts of atrocities committed by police in Kosovo as lies and manipulation.”
Source:
BBC News | Europe | Serbs attack Kosovo massacre reports
This was 7 months before JD’s murder. What sort of *reprisals* might the Serbs have been alluding to? A conventional military response was obviously out of the question, and by the end of 1998 British diplomats and their families had already fled Belgrade. But the Yugoslavs were skilled at assassinations, and had struck targets on Western European soil before - what rekindled my interest in this case was a BBC podcast called An Assassin Comes to Town, which tells the story of the attempted murder of a Croatian emigre who’d fled Yugoslavia for Australia before eventually settling in Scotland. One October morning in 1988, whilst walking his dog on a quiet suburban street on the outskirts of the town of Kirkcaldy, he was gunned down by a man in a passing car.
At least one bullet struck him in the mouth, another lodged in his chest. Yet incredibly he survived. The assassin was a member of Yugoslavia’s secret police, who’d travelled to the UK on a false, Swiss passport.
He’d have almost certainly escaped back to Yugoslavia afterwards, had it not been for the actions of a resident who, having read in the local newspaper about a recent series of break-ins, spotted a strange car in the area and, thinking it was connected to the burglaries, noted down the number plate.
Using this information Scottish police were able to track the perpetrator down, hauling him off a plane at Heathrow, and he was jailed for 15 years for this crime. After his release, he was tried - but acquitted - of the murder of another man in Paris. Later, he testified against other Yugoslav assassins, including one who was jailed in 2016 in Germany for the murder of another Croatian emigre in Bavaria.
These crimes obviously aren’t directly linked to JD’s murder and they occurred a decade or more prior to her killing, and before Yugoslavia’s slow, bloody collapse. But imo it shows what these people were capable of, and perhaps explains why those of us who were alive at the time found/find the Serbian assassin theory credible.
There are things about the various witness sightings which imo point to a hit, too, but this post is already probably too long, so perhaps I’ll write that up another day.
