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From the outside, this house in Serbia looks like a regular apartment building. The kind you'd walk past without giving it a second glance. But if you step into the garage and slip through this tiny hidden hatch leading down into the basement, suddenly you're standing in an eerie white room, well, white except for these small stains on the walls. The floor is covered with dark tiles, and at the back of the room stands a large machine. This room is used by the Balkan mafia. They kidnap their enemies and bring them here, allegedly torturing and killing them, but bodies are evidence, so they make sure there isn't any. Reportedly, with the help of an industrial meat grinder.
I think their motto was that if there's no body, they'll never be possible to prosecute us. This is the story of one of Europe's most notorious crime networks and their human slaughterhouse. their alleged ties to Serbia's elites and an ingenious takeown by relentless investigators. Trigger warning. This video contains graphic descriptions of violence as well as references to disturbing material. Viewer discretion is advised. Much of what we know about this case stems from an indictment by the prosecutor's office for organized crime in Serbia as well as reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the
Serbian Investigation Portal Creek. Their work has been crucial in uncovering this story. You can find links in the description. Chances are you'd struggle to find Serbia on a map. It's a landlocked country south of Hungary next to Romania. Roughly 6.5 million people live here. Politically, it's run by the right-wing SNS party. Alexander Vhuich has been president since 2017. On the streets of Serbia, the Balkan Mafia has a strong presence. Two clans play a major role, the Kavach and the Scaly. Their story begins in a neighboring country.
Carter is one of the most beautiful towns in Montenegro. This is Stevan Doy Chinovich. He's the editor-in chief of the Serbian Investigative Portal Creek. The heavily has huge old town which is really nice and it's popular tourist area and there's lot of basically sailors that actually coming from this town. In the 2000s a single criminal group called the Cotor clan operated here. It was under the rule of drug lord Darco Shadic. For more than a decade he controlled a significant share of the cocaine trade into Europe until he was arrested in 2014. And after a cocaine deal went wrong in Spain, the group split into two clans, the Kavach and the Skoliadi, named after two villages in the region. These two
clans don't just operate in Montenegro. They're active across the Balkans and traffic drugs all over Europe. But basically, the role of Balkan organized crime group is to transport big amounts of drugs from South America to Europe. And then usually they sell these drugs to European gangs. They will not deal with distributions. The Kavach and the Skolyatti are locked in a violent conflict. This basically means they're hunting each other down. I cannot even count anymore, but it was definitely more than 100 murders were connected in this war of these two gang. More than 100 definitely. And then in different countries, they found groups to join one another side. Like in
Bosnia, some of the Bostonian criminal groups join more like others join couch gang. As a result, the conflict between the Montenegron clans has spilled over into neighboring countries. Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, and Serbia. In Serbia, they were looking for like local Serbian allies. They found and one and is one of the their most important allies in Serbia was this criminal group around Bella. As you may have noticed, we've added this disclaimer to our videos. With generative AI on the rise, we want you to know there's a real team building these animations and researching and writing these stories. We don't think AI should ever replace human creativity and effort. In our view, if used correctly
and prudently, it can simply be a useful, supportive tool. Merlin AI is an all-in-one AI platform that gives users access to all major models in one subscription, including Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Each has different strengths like coding or research. Normally, you'd have to pick one and live with its limitations. Merlin gives you access to all of them in one place. If you were to subscribe to each one individually, you'd end up spending $200 plus dollars a month. But with Merlin, you can get access to all of them at $19 a month. And with the exclusive 75% discount for our viewers, that drops to just $5 a month. It's a limited time offer, so go check it out now. Use the deep research feature to get a first
glimpse into a topic. Summarize studies, run quick web searches, and find sources to dig deeper. One standout feature is projects. It's your shared knowledge hub. Everything you've researched in one place. You can even share it with your team. Click on the link in the description and use the code fern 5 to get the discount. In Belgrade stadiums, hooligans set the tone. Loud, aggressive, and powerful. One of them is Velico Bellivuk. In 2016, he's a member of a hooligan group called Yanichari. They were football hooligan group who suddenly appear out of the blue and become very important on the stadium of football club partisan.
CCTV footage shows Belly Vuk and others beating the bodyguard of the director of FC Partisan. After Yani Chadi's leader is murdered, Bellyuk takes over. According to the New York Times, he renames the group Principi because he acts on principle. But the name also carries an association with Gabriel Princip, a nationalist whose assassination of Archduke France Ferdinand of Austria set off World War I. Over time, Belivoop transforms. He's no longer just a leader of hooligans. He become one of the top allies of Kavage gang. Prince Cipi begins to operate as a major outpost for the Kavach. In 2020, the war between the Kavach and the Skolyatti is still raging. Belly Vuk and his group play their part in the war
on Serbian soil. And they come up with an idea, one that takes the violence to a whole new level. They start looking for a place to kill and destroy the evidence. They found a house which was very close to the river on the outskirts of the of the Belgrade. This building will become their slaughter house. Inside they set up a torture chamber. This is where they'll bring their victims, mostly members of rival gangs. So it's really perfectly hidden. Inside of the house is like normal house. But if you manage to open this wall, then you have small corridor and then what weights you under the stairs will like which will be
usually wrapped into the plastic prepared for the murder and with one chair. That's all. For me more scary part than this was actually how they were like bringing victims. Most of these people actually lured inside of the house. One of the victims is a man we'll call Luca Maric, not his real name. He's a leader of a rival partisan hooligan group and an important associate of a man called Philip Koraj. Now, Philip Korage is important organized crime figure from the Serbia who sided with Skyler gang. That means Luca has ties to the enemy. In August 2020, his wife is making dinner and feeding their two babies.
Luca heads out to buy guns. He was afraid for his life than moment, so he kind of felt something could happen. He wanted to buy new guns, most likely in order to better protect himself. According to the indictment, he meets a friend he trusts on a dirt road beside an empty field. Luca doesn't know it yet, but his friend has betrayed him. The meeting is a trap. Belly Vuk and his gang are waiting for him. Their mod superande will be to find a person which is very close to you which then they will make to shift the sides and start working with them and then they will use
somebody you trust to actually lure you. So this happened in this case they jump him, tie him up and take him to the slaughter house. Then they drag him inside, force him to unlock his phone and go through his contacts. The first moment he understood that basically he's done. According to the indictment, Belly Vuk and his gang begin to torture him. Afterwards, they behead Luca with an axe. They use his blood to write on his back courage. Which was kind of basically a message for this boss, Philip Cage. Then Belly Vuk and his gang send a photo of the scene to Luca's boss. One of the messages reads,
"Tick tock, tick tock. This is how you'll end up. We'll catch you." According to prosecutors, after that, Luca's body is cut into pieces and put through the industrial meat grinder. The remains end up in bags and are dumped into the Danube. River was the kind of final uh stage of uh dismantling the body which started inside of the house when they were basically chop the bodies and grind them through this uh machine until they literally become uh let's say um liquid in a way because then this liquid uh basically throwing in the river which fishes eat. So literally there was not even like small bone, anything that could be found. Then the bags along with the victim's clothes and belongings are burned.
They decide to run the slaughter house because they believe that's the most efficient way to kill people and not leave the traces. In the end, the whole thing was about uh efficiency and hiding any traces. And actually it was efficient in a way that till today nobody was recovered. I think their motto was that if there's nobody, they will never be possible to prosecute us. Luca is neither the only nor the last alleged victim of Belly Vuk and his group. Zrav Koroyovich was lured in a similar way with a promise of buying a gun. The prosecutor claims he also ended up in the meat grinder. And then there's Milan Laoya.
Milan Leap was the highest level uh criminal who was killed in the slaughter house. He was like some old school uh mafia guy. He first made headlines in 2007. Back then he was part of a group of notorious jewel thieves known as the Pink Panthers. It's like the group that Hollywood movies are made about. Their Dubai job, the Waffy Mall heist, was legendary. In just 170 seconds, they stole millions in jewelry and sped off in their Audi. But Interpol eventually caught up with them. DNA evidence linked
to the heist. He was ultimately arrested and sentenced to 9 years in prison. After that, he returned to his hometown in Serbia and got in bed with the Skolyatti clan. By 2020, he had a new job. He took role in one um attempt to murder the leader of Kavage gang raditzer in Ukraine. He was shot a couple of times, but he managed to survive. Leoo was allegedly involved in planning the attempted killing. Now the Kavage clan wants revenge. Like Luca, Leoa feels threatened. He starts looking for extra protection and considers buying an armored car. Belly Vuk and his gang hear about that and lure him into a trap and they call him to come to this house uh in Rtotopek.
Instead of buying a car, he too ends up in their torture room. And it's interesting how he reacted. So he was down in this chamber. He saw they came with ax to chop him. He reacted in a way like well what do you do? He said like this is very bizarre. I'm not for this kind of stuff. Like he said, I'm for like we can do fist fighting, we can shoot with the guns, but this thing no. And this is really interesting because you can see really kind of big difference between his older generation, these new young guys who are like kind of very much brutal. Even Stan calls Belly Vuk and his group a millennial mafia, a generation of criminals that doesn't just kill, but turns violence into a spectacle. And
though Laoa fights for his life, there's no escape. But how do we know all of this? Time to talk about Sky. Sky Global was founded in Canada in 2008. The company runs an encrypted messaging network and it sells phones that come with this ultra seccure network pre-installed. A lot of users switch to Skyones after a similar encrypted phone provider was taken over and then shut down by the authorities. The camera, microphone, and GPS are all disabled in Skyones. The encrypted messenger Sky ECC is hidden inside the calculator app. Users access it by entering a specific code and then you use your uh your nickname which you create to communicate with
other nicknames through this sky network. So it was basically way how the uh how basically criminals can uh speak. You can choose for your messages to automatically delete. If the phone isn't used for a certain period of time, it'll erase itself. There are also features like a panic password and a kill switch. The phones can be accessed remotely to instantly wipe all data from them. The company is so confident in its privacy protections that it offers 5 million US to anyone who can break their encryption within 90 days. Skyones are perfect for people who value privacy above all else. And they're quite popular with criminals. You can't just walk into a store and buy one. They're distributed through a complex network of
distributors and lower level resellers. This man known as the smiling butcher claims he was one of them. So he literally worked for the Sky company and selling their phones. It's unclear whether he worked for Sky Global in any official capacity, but he's the tech guy for Belly Vuk's Prince CP Hooligan Group, and he makes sure they conduct their business via the Sky network. Belly Vuk and his henchmen share messages and photos in group chats on Sky ECC. They think they're safe, but they aren't. In the late 2010s, police find more and more SkyPones in the hands of criminals. So, they begin investigating the network behind them. Authorities in the
Netherlands and France discover that the Global Sky Communications Network mainly runs through two servers. They're both located in a data center of the hosting company OVH in Northern France. French authorities install an IP tap on the servers to monitor their traffic. The traffic is encrypted, so they can't read messages yet. But analysts find a way to copy the server's memory. Through that, they obtain an encryption certificate. Using that certificate, French, Belgian, and Dutch authorities develop a method to decrypt Sky ECC's communications. This allows them to read the user's messages. In 2021, a joint team of European law enforcement agencies gets to work. They spend several weeks
reading Sky Chats in real time. It's a rare moment. To them, it feels like standing outside in the dark, peeking inside a house, when suddenly someone turns on the lights. More than that, it feels as if they're suddenly sitting at the dinner table with the criminals. The authorities intercept approximately a billion messages. According to law enforcement, about 170,000 Skyhones are registered worldwide. Each month, roughly 70,000 users actively communicate on the platform. Some are located in the Americas, but most are in Europe. About a quarter of all active users are based in Belgium and the Netherlands. Many of their messages, police say, cluster around one specific place, the port of Antworp. We've
already made a video about how Antworp's port has become Europe's main gateway for cocaine and how cartels recruit miners to break into containers and retrieve drugs for them. But a lot of other messages the authorities read come from an entirely different region, the Balkans. They also stumble upon the communications of Bellyvuk and his gang, and what they uncover is horrifying. The prosecution has collected the nicknames that the criminals used in the app. In one of the chats, Belly Vuk using his nickname Soprano writes, "I can't wait to strangle him." And see honey, Mexico in the middle of Belgrade.
Even when he's not around, he seems to be asking his men to describe the torture at length. Don't skip those juicy details for me. In the chats, Soprano approves kidnappings and killings with short messages. We're for it. The smiling butcher writes, "He has already lost a finger and is badly ruined, but the idiot thinks he will get out. I've already skinned him well." And boom, Mar hits him in the head. He got a brutal beating by then, bro. He was already seriously unconscious. Afterwards, bro, he was all black. He didn't resist much, didn't cry, nothing. He was in terrible shock.
The authorities see all the pictures the gang shares in their chats. Screenshots of Bitcoin transfers to pay off hitmen, fake identity documents, bundles of cash, weapons, shipments of cocaine, and disturbing photos of torture. Police can see all this evidence because Belly Vuk and his gang didn't delete the photos. Because, you know, the sky is a system every month basically cleans everything. So in order to save these photos in the end of the month, they were always sending them to somebody from inside of the gang just to keep them safe. So they really wanted to keep these messages. It's weird, but in a way how they found the house, how they build the house with this secret corridor, how the careful
was not to leave any traces that they did everything like so carefully there and they were like taking and saving these photos was major evidence and that's kind of really interesting element to the whole uh whole thing. French authorities informed the Serbian police about the chats. As a result, Belly Vuk and part of his gang are arrested. They're charged with criminal association, multiple aggravated murders, drug and arms trafficking, kidnapping, and rape. Hundreds more alleged criminals are arrested in other raids across Europe. In Belgium, more than 100 people are convicted in the country's biggest drug trial ever. Sky Global's CEO Jean Francois Eb and former distributor Thomas Herdman were indicted
in both the US and France. In the US, even Herdman are accused of knowingly and intentionally participating in a criminal enterprise that facilitated drug trafficking. In a statement and in an interview with Motherboard, the CEO said that law enforcement was trying to vilify anyone who pushed back against unwarranted surveillance. According to him, the encrypted chat platform existed for one reason, to protect the fundamental right to privacy. After the arrests, the police searched the house in Rita. They entered the garage, climbed through the hidden hatch, opened the door, and found evidence of the blood bath that took place there. The industrial meat grinder. A groove cut into the tiled floor running from one side to the
other. Several stains on the walls, on the door, next to a radiator, on the tap, and on the light switches. The smiling butcher cut a deal with the authorities. Based on his testimony and the DNA found in the room, authorities believed that at least seven people were killed in the slaughterhouse. The arrest of Belly Vuk and his group was celebrated as a major victory for the Serbian authorities and it also caught the attention of politicians. The Serbian president seemed very pleased that Bellivuk and his gang had been arrested. Yet he himself is accused of having enabled figures like Bellivuk to operate under quiet protection for years. In 2006, Montenegro broke away from
Serbia after a popular vote. The Serbian government under President Tadage followed reformist center-left policies. But ever since Alexander Vuch became president in 2017, he's been running the country more like an autocracy. Freedom of expression is limited. Corruption is rampant. The growing frustration with the government has fueled repeated protests over the years. At the beginning of VH's first presidency, demonstrations against dictatorship erupted. A year later, another wave of protests followed after an opposition politician was brutally attacked by a group of hooded men. In 2023, a school shooting sparked the Serbia Against Violence protests. And in 2024, the canopy at a freshly renovated train
station in Novvisad collapsed, killing 16 people. And uh the reason for this is corruption because of the corruption, everything was badly done. The train station was meant to showcase Serbia's progress, but instead became a symbol of everything going wrong in the country. Huge studentled protests aimed directly at VH's government erupted across the country. The authorities responded with violent crackdowns. In the year after the tragedy, more than 80 journalists were physically attacked. Vhuch doesn't hesitate to deploy police forces against anti-government protesters. But according to Steon, he's also using
organized crime figures, which he's bringing against the protesters. We have government who basically cooperates with organized crime. It's 2017, 2 years before they use the slaughter house. A murder shakes Serbia's capital and Belly Vuk is caught up in it. The police arrest him and sees his phone and they found very interesting WhatsApp messages inside. These chats end up in the hands of journalists who start digging through them. They revealed that Bellyvuk has some powerful contacts.
We found that actually belly book in that time was in direct contact with one really important member of Serbian Jander. That's a specially trained paramilitary unit within the Serbian police. This is his photo from army but from army he moved to the police and he become one of the top persons in Serbian and they were like daily every day communicating and we see from the message basically he was approving and advising blew what to do. Belook will say I need to go after these guys and he say like no keep quiet or do this do this. This member of the Serbian Jandar Marie according to the messages creek has seen effectively acted as bellyuk superior and from him the trail led further up
the chain. this Jander guy, this police guy was uh informing about everything. A person he calls Diana. Diana Kaloich was general secretary of Serbian police, which means after the minister, she was number two in the police. And according to Stevon, this top secretary of the police was informed about everything the police officer in Bellibou discussed. But it doesn't end there. When something really important is to decide, a police officer will say that besides DA also the boss and big boss are informed. They never mention who boss and big boss are. But following the logic of hierarchy, boss can only be like minister of police which was name big boss could be just president who was top of everything. Belivvuk himself
later testified that his gang was organized for the needs and by the order of Alexander Vhuch. Through his testimony, Belivuk explained all the favors that he was doing to the government and actually telling why it's important for the Serbian government always to have control over these football cooling groups. According to Belivuk, his gang would intimidate anti-government protesters during football games. They would stop fans from chanting against the president. Also, when making his own protest, he will bring holy guns to have bigger number in there. So, literally government was using them some sort of like street force. The president denies all the allegations and says he never met Belly Vuk. What we believe that
happened is that um when the French police entered the skyones and when they found the all the pictures and videos of the violence, torturing, dismantling bodies that and when the Serbia was informed, we believe that President Putish understood that he cannot any longer work with the Blew group because he understood this is like become international issue is So for this reason, we believe that eventually he basically arrested Bellyuk gang. Belly Vuk and parts of his gang are off the streets, at least for now. But the system that backed them is still in place. Police officials that instruct thugs and work closely together with them. And a president who's accused of
using hooligans to silence his people. So far, almost no politicians or police officers have been brought to court in connection with this case. President control who controls the whole police, prosecution, everything. And in these u terms, it's not possible that you have top officials to be prosecuted. Here in the center of Belgrade is the Serbian president's office and in front of his office is one big park and it was really nice park before but what he present did he created uh some sort of camp there and inside our camp where he brought a lot of these
criminals. Stevan and his team at Creek identified many of them as members of organized crime, people with long police records of violence and drug smuggling. And according to Stevon, the president uses these criminals as guards of a sort in front of his office. So the protester can never really come very close to him. We asked the Serbian president for a statement but didn't receive a response. So the whole point is that the belly group is out but I mean the modus is still there. uh and until we have this sort of government now and our president in um on power nothing will change. He always bringing this guys uh he will encourage organized crime structures helping them because he also have this
value from them because they will protect him on another way.
