Balkans -Criminal Syndicates used the fragile Bosnia fragile institutions to forge identities and acquire passports

In a disturbing revelation from the core of the Balkans, a large investigation report has revealed how organized crime systematically exploited institutional weaknesses in Bosnia and Herzegovina to forge identities and maintain legitimate passes. The program described by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIN) shows that dozens of violent criminals are connected to the most powerful bonds in the region in connection with the Kavač and Škaljari-Clans-used stolen identities, corrupt insider and systemic errors that can work under false names for almost a year.

Between 2013 and 2022, at least 60 members of these criminal groups successfully received Bosnian passes among fraudulent identities. These documents enabled them to travel freely across international borders, to escape law enforcement and commit crimes under clean identities. Many of these identities belonged to unsuspecting Bosnian citizens, especially those who had emigrated and were never requested for local ID cards, ideal goals for identity theft.

These criminal actors were not only based on counterfeits or fake documents, but on an alarming level of insider support. With the help of corrupt police officers and officials, they access legitimate government databases and manipulated state records to receive real identity documents that were based on stolen personal data from unsuspecting Bosnian citizens-typically emigrated decades ago and were never applied for on updated identity papers. These victims did not know that their names were used to commit international crimes while their lives were turned upside down when border weapons and criminal charges appeared against them.

At the center of this scandal is a uniquely vulnerable state infrastructure. Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country that was still ruled according to the complex agreements of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, is divided into two autonomous companies and a district with its own administrative structures and minimal coordination of the Inter-Agency. This fragmented governance model has made Bosnia's institutions particularly susceptible to infiltration and exploitation through organized crimes.

The vulnerability of Bosnia is based on its deeply fragmented and inefficient administrative framework, a legacy of the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the war from 1992 to 1995. The country's institutions often work in silos with minimal coordination, a weakness that was easily exploited by organized crimes.

At the center of this institutional functional disorder is the central identity database of the state, the agency for identification documents, registers and data exchange (IDDEA). According to an examination of the organized crime and corruption reporting project (OCCRP), infiltrated criminal networks of this system through mediators who had the non -authorized access. These insiders identified legitimate citizen-in particular those who had left the country and had never applied for ID cards. Due to the lack of biometric data such as fingerprints with minimal detection risk, the identities could be acquired due to the lack of biometric data.

The fraudulent process began with forged ID cards that bore the names of these citizens, but with the photographs of the criminals. With these fake documents, the gangs then effectively acquire residency papers, citizenship certificates and finally authentic Bosnian passes, which create a legal identity from scratch.

The criminal operation was not just the work of shadowy figures; It was experienced by a network of corrupt civil servants that were embedded in the institutions of Bosnia. One of the most noticeable among them is Dalibor ćurlik, a former police officer from Banja Luka, the second largest city of Bosnia.

The role of ćurlik in the travel scheme is both extensive and outrageous. According to the law enforcement agencies, he provided members of the Kavač clans direct support, including Radoje Živković, a high -ranking gang member who was involved in a number of murders and drug trafficking across Europe.

In June 2021, Živković visited a police station in Banja Luka under the wrong name “Andrej Jović”, a real Bosnian citizen who had been moving to Serbia for a long time. Despite the photo on the ID card, the application was clearly processed by Živković without resistance to manipulate the system. Ćurlik even registered Živković in the speech of his mother, a tactic that he had repeatedly used to create the illusion of a legal stay.

The surveillance material preserved by journalists shows that Živković is fingered and photographed in the police station. Weeks later he left Sarajevo with a real Bosnian passport that was founded in Istanbul. A little more than a year later, Živković was further reinforced the murder of the Škaljari leader Jovan Vukotić in Istanbuls Şişli-Distrikt-A-Brutal hit, which further strengthened the violent feud between Montenegro's gang. The Turkish authorities later arrested Živković and sentenced him to life imprisonment. At the time of the arrest, the passport of his assumed Bosnian identity was in his possession.

But ćurlik's participation stretched over just one case. It is assumed that he has helped at least four more criminal figures to secure passports with the same fraudulent methods. In any case, he registered the applicants at the house of his mother, accompanied her personally through the bureaucratic process and collected her documents in the issue. His other “customers” included Marko Petrović, a Serbian citizen with violent crimes, and Almir Jahović, a Kavač operator with interpoles who was charged with attempted murder. Jahović was arrested when he received his Pass-Alongside ćurlik himself.

While the Kavač Syndicate Banja Luka took advantage of her rival and Škaljari clan, a parallel passport fraud network from Brčko, the autonomous district in the northeast of Bosnia. Her operation was made by Nikola Vein, a Serbian citizen who owned his own fake Bosnian passport and acted as a fixer for at least a dozen Škaljari members.

Vein calculated about 5,000 euros per pass, whereby methods were used almost identical to those of ćurlik: stolen identities, fake residency documents and the manipulation of Bosnia's weak bureaucratic systems. One of the notorious customers of Vein was Ratko Živković, a former Škaljari member who later changed the loyalities in the Kavač clan. Živković's passport became short of the murder of the Škaljari boss Alan Kožar on the Greek island of Corfu in 2020. He remains a refugee to this day.

While criminal new life and global mobility had achieved, the innocent victims of identity theft rushed into a legal and personal chaos. Bosnian citizens living abroad were often hired to borders, arrested and treated as suspects based on the red communications published by Interpol.

Predrag đurđević, a Bosnian citizen living in Serbia, was stunned to discover that his identity had been stolen. The police came on his farm and asked for a pass that he had never advertised. In the meantime, his cousin đurađ Trivunović experienced even worse: at the Bosnia Serbia border in August 2022, under suspicion of being a criminal, he was held in a tail heat for hours when his wife and child visited his wife and child. Although he was finally released, he was marked again only two days later after entering Serbia. Trivunović was forced to hire legal advisors and to review the criminal police from Brčko to prove that he was the real victim and not the perpetrator.

“It is still not clear,” said Trivunović. “It still feels like I am marked.”

This scandal is not just an example of bureaucratic mismanagement or minor corruption. It is a serious national security crisis for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ability of organized crime syndicates to maintain legitimate travel documents through manipulation of state systems shows deep systemic errors that go far beyond individual misconduct.

Criminal syndicates have successfully transformed Bosnia into a hub to determine its weak institutions, decentralized governance and limited data protection, to develop identities, to move illegal goods and to avoid judiciary. As long as Bosnia is missing a coordinated and safe identification system with a biometric review and robust supervisory mechanisms, it remains not only for identity theft, but also for the international infiltration of some of the most violent criminal organizations in the world.

For Bosnia, the challenge is now urgently and existential. Without quick and comprehensive reform to its identification systems, the coordination of the law enforcement authorities and the anti -corruption framework, the state risk will be a playground for gangs, whose operations go far beyond the regional security of the Balkans and separate the country's reputation on the global stage.

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