PICKPOCKETS ARE RAMPAGING THROUGH KALEMEGDAN: Citizens and tourists are the targets, and here is the riskiest spot! (VIDEO)

From March to October, pickpocket attacks on tourists at “Belgrade Fortress” are an everyday occurrence. “We know what they look like, how they behave,” an N1 interviewee says.

A video showing two young men threatening, insulting, and one of them throwing a stone at Kalemegdan went viral last weekend.

As stated, this was a conflict between tour guides and pickpockets who, as claimed in the video, “operate” daily around Kalemegdan. The video was shot on Friday, September 26, and according to the tour guide Dobrosav Janković, similar situations have been happening for a long time, he told N1.

“They look like tourists at first glance”

“Literally every day in the area of the Kalemegdan Park and Belgrade Fortress, you have various groups operating and robbing citizens and tourists. From the end of March to the end of October, it happens every day. It’s just a question of whether they will be caught or not,” says Janković.

He says that he and his colleagues have a lot of experience with pickpockets; they know what they look like, how they behave, and they recognize them very quickly.

“They are mostly between 20 and 30 years old. There are usually two, three, or four of them. Typically, they act as a male and female pair, two pairs, or two men and one woman. At first glance, you would say they are real tourists, often carrying maps, guidebooks, and moving together. They look around, and when they notice a larger group, they latch onto them. While a colleague is talking about a locality, for example, they see who is holding things behind their back. It takes them two to three seconds to unzip a zipper, take out what they need, and move away,” Janković explains.

Stairs are the riskiest

He says that most robberies happen on the stairs, because when tourists start climbing, they don’t feel someone rummaging through their things.

“The most frequent places are the Clock Tower, where there are stairs, and two tunnels. Near the Clock Tower is the Stambol Gate, there are also stairs leading to the ramparts, then the stairs near the Ružica Church, and then those near the plateau above the Victor (Pobednik) and the plateau where the Victor is, and downwards. There’s a video from a couple of months ago, where a pickpocket is seen following a female tourist and taking her wallet out of her bag. People viewed that video more as entertainment, like, ‘look how he steals’,” Janković points out.

The institutions, for now at least, do not have an effective solution. The police are interested in the latest case due to the higher degree of violence and the viral nature of the video. Janković says it is a shame that something like this had to happen, “to escalate and for someone to question their own safety and the safety of guests and tourists” just to draw public attention. As he states, the communal police are not interested in this.

“The police in Stari Grad told us that if there is no damage, the prosecutor dismisses the report. If they send a patrol and it apprehends a person, and there is no damage, then it’s nothing again, the suspect walks free. That is the modus operandi, the law and the rules, but there is no effect,” Janković describes.

He states that the people from “Belgrade Fortress” are desperate and, as far as he knows, they have written to their superiors, while the Stari Grad municipality says they do not have the personnel for patrols. Janković says there are solutions and that they are applied in other cities.

“Introduce video surveillance or patrols that will be visible and regular, not like now—just for a couple of days every few months. Then what happens, happens,” Janković advises.

No protection

As he points out, it is unusual that there is no protection at Kalemegdan Fortress.

“Those two from the video could, for example, wait for me, beat me up, and by the time someone calls the police—and they need 15 minutes—they could bury me. It’s not just about me. Some lunatic could come to the Fortress, where there are several hundred tourists, and start wielding a knife or a machete. Those things happen,” Janković concludes.

N1 wrote to the MUP, the City of Belgrade, the Stari Grad municipality, and the communal police. There was no response by the time the text was published.