Serbia’s former intelligence chief Aleksandar Vulin has claimed responsibility for the arrest of opposition politician Nikola Sandulovic, who was brutally beaten while in custody. 

Vulin’s claim has been greeted with scepticism as it is now two months since he resigned as head of the Security and Information Agency (BIA). 

Speaking to Novosti, Vulin said he had issued an order for Sandulovic’s arrest, which remained effective even after he stepped down from the helm of the BIA in November. 

Vulin defended the arrest, which was made at Sandulovic’s home after the Serb politician laid a wreath on the grave of the late Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) leader Adem Jashari.

Jashari was killed along with dozens of family members in the Prekaz massacre led by the Special Anti-Terrorism Unit of Serbia in March 1998. 

Vulin claimed the opposition politician had been working to overthrow the constitutional order in Serbia. 

“If Sandulovic had laid a wreath on Himmler’s grave, Mossad would have killed him, if he had laid a wreath on Osama bin Laden’s grave, the CIA would have killed him. Laying a wreath on the grave of the murderer of Serbs Adem Jashari, Sandulovic was detained only by my order and detained by the order of the prosecutor," Vulin told Vecernje Novosti. 

Sandulovic, leader of the Serbian Republican Party, was beaten by members of the secret services after he was detained for questioning, his relatives and lawyer say. 

He was arrested at his home by BIA agents on January 3 after apologising for crimes Serbia committed against ethnic Albanians during the Kosovan war of independence in 1998-99. 

According to reports posted on social media, there was no news of Sandulovic until he was found in intensive care at the VMA military hospital in Belgrade on January 4. 

Cedomir Stojkovic, a prominent Serbian human rights lawyer, posted on social network X that Sandulovic's wife informed him her husband was taken forcibly by the security services and subjected to “brutal violence”. 

Stojkovic dismissed Vulin’s claim he was responsible for the arrest as an “obvious lie”. 

"Vulin didn't order the arrest because he couldn't even order it — because [Serbian President] Aleksandar Vucic told him to resign TWO MONTHS before Sandulovic put a post on the X network about laying flowers on Albanian graves,” he wrote on social network X (formerly Twitter). 

“[T]here is no intelligence agency on this planet where the director's detention orders are executed two months or two years, or two decades after the termination of office,” he added. 

“With this statement ... Aleksandar Vulin wants to say that under his mandate, the Security Information Agency and all its members have become so stupid and incompetent that they don't even know who their director is, so they are carrying out some kind of backward orders from the former director.”

Vulin resigned from the BIA six weeks before Serbia’s December 17 general election, and several months after the US imposed sanctions on him in July. 

The sanctions were issued due to Vulin's alleged involvement in corrupt activities that have not only advanced corruption within Serbia's governing institutions but also facilitated Russia's malign activities in the region, a US statement said at the time. 

In his resignation letter, Vulin said he was stepping down to shield Vucic and Serbia from Western "threats and blackmail" regarding their stance on international sanctions against Russia. 

Vulin, who previously held positions as defence minister and minister of interior, is a key pro-Russian figure in Serbia. As interior minister he controversially travelled to Moscow in mid-2022 and met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, telling the Russian diplomat that Serbia was the only country in Europe that has not “become part of the anti-Russian hysteria”. 

There is speculation Vulin resigned to avoid a link being established between the Serbian leadership and the perpetrators of a deadly attack in the Kosovan town of Banjska. A gang of armed Serbs killed a border guard and engaged in a gun battle with law enforcers from inside an Orthodox monastery in September 2023. 

Kosovo's Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla has claimed that one of the three armed Serbian attackers who were killed during the Kosovan police operation in Banjska was Vulin’s former bodyguard.