A woman from Maribor five years after threats with a gun, robbery and kidnapping about the worst two days of her life

It is impossible to imagine what the woman who was forced to go through five years ago Aleksandar Miljus threatened her with a gun in a garage in Klinetova Street in Maribor and kidnapped her with the intention of taking possession of her car and savings in her bank account.

The story of 80,000 euros in the account

“What happened to me still haunts me today. I have nightmares, every time I get into the car with great hesitation. I am haunted by the feeling that it will happen again, that again someone will sit in the back seat and threaten me with a gun.” last week at the Miljuš trial, the victim tried to describe the worst day of her life to judge Gregor Pograjac. It was September 25, 2019. In the morning, she unsuspectingly went to her car, sat in it and planned to drive to work, but the accused interrupted her plans. “Suddenly he opened the car door, sat in the back seat of the car, put a gun to the back of my head and ordered me to follow the instructions,” the victim had to relive the kidnapping at the trial. At first, it seemed that she would be able to stay on her feet despite the traumatic experience, but it didn’t work out. Her voice began to shake, her legs could no longer support her, as a result of which the judge suggested that the victim, who has type 1 diabetes, continue her testimony sitting next to her attorney, a lawyer Maja Praviček.

Miljuš ordered the woman from Maribor to take her to Stražunska gozd. There, he asked her to hand over her bank card, tell him her PIN code, hand over her identity card and turn off her mobile phone. He then tied her up with plastic ties and forced her to lie down in the trunk. He kept her until the next day and kept telling her that if he got a liquidation order from his bosses, he would either shoot her or make her commit suicide with an overdose of drugs, or throw her into the river. According to the testimony of a woman from Maribor, the accused introduced himself to her as a hired killer, a member of an international criminal group, who had come from Switzerland with a new task, i.e. to kidnap her. He explained to her that 80,000 euros had been transferred to her bank account and that his superior, who is the favorite of the main boss of the group, would give him instructions on how to get the money and what to do with it. The Maribor woman, who at the time was employed at the Bank Claims Management Company (DUTB), believed the kidnapper that someone had transferred the specified amount to her account. As an employee of BAMT, where she also received training on money laundering, the story that Miljuš sold her seemed entirely plausible, even “typical money laundering story”. At one of the stops, the accused also told the abductee that he was going to the ATM with her card to check if the money was already in the account.

“The first time he said he couldn’t check the balance, then we went to another location and when he got back in the car he said the money was in the account. I believed,” testified the victim, who only had about 1,000 euros in her account at the time. Why Miljuš chose her as his victim has not yet been explained. The woman from Maribor says that she does not know the accused and that she is sure that she never met him before the kidnapping.

Drove into McDrive during the kidnapping

According to the woman from Maribor, the accused was always on the phone with a woman. She caught him calling her Irena. She has not seen this woman, but she assumes that it was she who brought her first food to Stražunska gozd. “I always have water, cookies, chocolate in the car, in case I have a sugar low. The defendant ate all of this for me, and I then told him that I was a diabetic and that I needed to eat. He called someone, someone came to the forest and I got bread and cheese spread,” the victim recalled. She also mentioned that the accused, after checking what she could eat, took her to McDrive, got her a hamburger and took her back to Stražun. Miljuš was not the only one guarding her in the forest there. Another man came and guarded her for several hours. She couldn’t see his face, because every time she was allowed to get out of the trunk, she had to tie her jacket over her head.

Miljuš detained the Maribor woman for two days, during which time he worked on her several times “visible under the influence of drugs”the victim testified. At one of these moments, she judged that she had to talk him into letting her go. She convinced him that she would run out of insulin, that changing the insulin pump was so difficult that she needed help, that someone close to her would start missing her, that the police would soon be looking for her. When Miljuš decided to release her, he told the victim that she should not go to the police. “He wanted something for the warranty, so he gave me two options. The first was that they would take me to a house where they would take pictures of me naked and publish the photos if I went to the police. Another option was to transfer a car to it,” said the woman from Maribor, adding that she chose the second option. After she transferred the car to the kidnapper, somewhere in Zrkovci, she was transferred to the trunk of another car due to her damage. Miljuš brought the victim back to the place where he kidnapped her, told her that she would get the car back if she did not go to the police, and that someone would bring the stolen computer home to her “in ten minutes”. When he finally released her, the woman from Maribor didn’t care about the car and the computer, so she reported what happened to her to the police.

The accused abductees did not want to listen

Because of the car theft and the kidnapping of a woman from Maribor, Miljuš is not sitting alone on the dock. The investigators are convinced that she also participated in this Irena Ajdnik. On Thursday, as she was ordered to be brought into custody, the police brought her to the trial, and Miljuš spoke to the Maribor court via video conference from the prison in Dob, where he is serving a multi-year prison sentence for acts he also committed in 2019. The accused did not want to listen to the testimony of the abducted Maribor woman. They told the judge that they agreed to a trial in absentia and announced that they would defend themselves at one of the next hearings. By agreeing to a trial in absentia, the defendants automatically waived the right to ask questions of the abductees, and Miljuš also waived the right to ask questions of the rest of the victims, as the theft of the car and the kidnapping of the Maribor woman are not the only acts for which he is on trial. He is also accused of stealing a car in Kamnica on September 18, 2019, and a week earlier in the Maribor settlement of Brezje robbing a shopkeeper in Market Betka.