Bosnia-Herzegovina police raided a popular local newspaper that allegedly had a recording with incriminating language from a politician who heads the left-wing Social Democrats party.
Police reportedly were searching for a phone recording with the voice of Serbian Republika Srpska Prime Minister Zeljka Cvijanovic. The audio tape could possibly implicate her with political bribery–buying electoral support from various political entities.
Officers were not on scene to investigate the legality of the revelations within the recording. Instead, they raided the offices with the mission to search for information as to whether the journalists broke the law when they obtained the tape.
Police then began interrogating the news site’s editors and reporters about the recording in question.
The Klix.ba news site said a court-ordered raid led police to confiscate “laptops, hard drives from all of their computers, private mobile phones, USB memory flashsticks, and CDs,” according to a Radio Free Liberty report.
The raid was a “brutal attack” on press freedom, said Borka Rudic, secretary general of the Bosnian Journalists Association. “I guess that the raid was launched because of the published audio recording. They have not given us any information, nor are they letting us into the Klix newsroom,” she added.
Rudic told Fena news agency, “It is absurd that police are investigating how the media got the recording and from who, instead of investigating its authenticity and whether someone bought MPs,” she told Fena news agency.