Young Guns: Vulnerable Youths, ‘Disposable Goods’ in Balkan Drug Feuds

It was a Saturday evening in early December and the Belgrade restaurant was packed. Upstairs, a children’s birthday party was in full swing, while waiters downstairs hurried from one table to the next. No one paid much attention to the 16-year-old in a hoodie, standing at the bar among customers waiting to be seated. That is, not until he approached a table where two men were sitting, pulled a gun from his jeans and began shooting. Nine bullets. Five hit a man identified by the initials N.K.; four lodged themselves in the restaurant furniture. The shooter fled and N.K. survived. The man he was with, Nenad Alajbegovic, walked away unscathed. The leader of a faction of football hooligans, Alajbegovic had been the intended target. The 16-year-old had shot the wrong man. According to police reports seen by BIRN, which identify the killer by the initials B.R., he was paid 5,000 euros. He fled to neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, laid low for six weeks, but was arrested on his return to Belgrade. Police found an encrypted phone on him; the messages revealed he had been assigned another murder, this time for 150,000 euros. The boy said he didn’t know who hired him beyond the nicknames they used in encrypted messages. Poor, gullible, and easily discarded, youths like him are increasingly in demand as hired guns among organised crime gangs in Serbia and Montenegro, according to cases of gang-related killings reviewed by BIRN. Of B.R., a police source in Serbia said: “I doubt he would ever have actually been paid the 150,000 euros. He was hired as a paid gun, not a professional killer.” “Many young people disappear without a trace after such jobs,” the source told BIRN on condition of anonymity. “Sometimes we find out they were killed because it’s cheaper for the clans than paying them. Or the clan itself simply tips off police about where the perpetrators of a hit are, so they get arrested and the case gets ticked off as solved while the trail to those who ordered it goes cold.” The phenomenon is also now on the radar of the European Union’s policy agency, Europol. “Organised crime groups increasingly try to create distance between those who order violence and those who carry it out,” said a Europol spokesperson. “Young perpetrators are often recruited because they may have no established connection to the criminal organisation, and in some cases no prior criminal record either. They’re usually assigned a single task, which makes it harder to link them to the organizers and easier to replace them if arrested.” 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.” ‘I fear for my safety’ Less than two months after Sipkovski died allegedly trying to kill Tadija Pantic, Pantic turned up dead in Belgrade. Eighteen-year-old Pavle Filipovic was arrested in Belgrade on suspicion of killing him. His alleged accomplice, whom police have not identified, remains at large. The pair are accused of shooting Pantic from a moving motorcycle, which was later burned. Filipovic has so far refused to say who hired him. “Minors and young adults are usually recruited by suspicious figures at betting shops or places where people gather to buy drugs, even in high school schoolyards,” said the police source. “They’re promised a new identity, that they’ll leave the country, get a big payout.” What they actually get is an encrypted phone, a few thousand euros, and instructions from senders identified only by nickname. After spending a few days in a rented apartment eating takeaway food, they are driven to the scene of the crime. “A photo of the future victim and the location for the killing all arrive on the encrypted phone,” the inspector said. “Escape logistics are usually the weakest link, because clan bosses lose nothing with the arrest of young hired killers. They’re actually not even part of the criminal organisations; they’re just disposable goods.” That’s precisely what happened with 19-year-old Nikola Babic, arrested on June 6 last year within minutes of killing Ivan Aleksic and trying to kill Luka Mitic in the Serbian capital. Babic, who confessed, said he had agreed to carry out the killing to clear a drug debt, built up after he was approached by two men in the park where he was sleeping rough and offered the chance to sell drugs. As well as selling, he was using. “Those two people suggested that I kill two men for them and, if I did, they would forgive my debt,” Babic told prosecutors. “I agreed, and they gave me an encrypted Google Pixel phone.” “I don’t want to reveal their identities because I fear for my safety and the safety of my siblings, who are in foster care, and the safety of my mother.” Ten days before the murder, he received photos of the targets and was moved into a rented apartment in central Belgrade. Soon after, he said, a teenager brought him a gun and they were both moved to another apartment. Babic said the boy, aged 16, had grown up in a home for children without parental care. Babic said he was sent the address of a cafe by phone and told to go. He and the 16-year-old opened fire as the targets left the cafe. Aleksic died, Mitic fled. A few months later, a 20-year-old woman from Belgrade was arrested and charged with passing information about the victims’ movements to an unknown person in exchange for 7,000 euros. The information was then passed to the hired killers. The 16-year-old shooter was convicted and sent to a juvenile correctional facility. Babic is currently on trial. ‘Business model’ Two other cases since mid-2025 reviewed by BIRN involved killers or accomplices aged 20 or younger. In general, said the Europol spokesperson, “Europol has observed that violence-as-a-service is an inherently transnational criminal business model”. The person commissioning an attack, the recruiter, those providing logistical support, the perpetrator and the intended target may all be located in different countries. This fragmentation makes it particularly challenging to identify and prosecute those ultimately responsible for ordering the violence. In Serbia, organised crime prosecutors cannot prosecute minors, resulting in situations in which two separate criminal proceedings are conducted for the same offence, before different courts, brought by different prosecutors. “We are aware of the fact that for more than 10 years now, children [under 14] as well as minors [up to age 18] have been reported as perpetrators of the most serious criminal offences,” Serbia’s chief public prosecutor for organised crime, Mladen Nenadic, told BIRN. “This practice has been most prevalent in South American countries, and the reason for engaging children and minors is the absence of criminal liability, or a lower degree of criminal liability.” “Children and minors are usually engaged through intermediaries so that a connection to high-ranking members of organised criminal groups cannot be proven, and when selecting individuals, criteria such as belonging to poor social strata, as well as coming from broken families, are generally used.” “The fees for carrying out criminal offenses are symbolic, and these individuals very often agree to commit crimes in order to gain status and membership in an organised criminal group, with the goal of proving themselves and securing future positioning.” Violence as a service European criminal networks such as Foxtrot in Sweden use the so-called ‘violence as a service’ model, recruiting minors via social media to carry out killings and other violent attacks, according to Europol. The agency says the trend has spread from Scandinavia to other parts of Europe. According to data from the Operational Task Force that Europol formed in April 2025 to combat this phenomenon, young perpetrators are recruited through internet platforms, with tasks presented to them in a manner similar to video games, complete with instructions and the promise of monetary rewards. The task force currently includes 11 countries – Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Since its formation, police have arrested more than 280 people.