Last night, the police got a hot new lead on the whereabouts of Edin Gacic, who is wanted by the police for two murders, one of which was the murder of a police officer, said Sarajevo Canton’s Interior Minister, Admir Katica, for N1.

“Last night we got a hot new lead on the whereabouts of Edin Gacic, and I hope it will be useful to us. It’s a very valuable piece of information, and I hope it works out for us. We’ll see what happens,” Katica said.

Asked how long could a fugitive hide from the police, he said it is hard to say. If it were an average person, they would be apprehended by not. Obviously, he added, Gacic is not an ordinary person, and he knows how to use his surroundings and how to adapt, but adverse weather conditions are working against him.

All Bosnian police agencies are actively looking for a suspect in two murders, Edin Gacic, who is suspecting a civilian in a settlement near the central-Bosnian town of Konjic, and a police officer in Trnovo, a settlement near Sarajevo.

Back in 1999, Gacic was convicted to a 14 prison sentence for another murder. During a prison leave in 2002, he killed his own mother. He was then convicted to a single 20-year sentence and prior to the expiration of his sentence, he was transferred to a Bihac prison, in northern Bosnia, whose administration wrote to several competent institutions, saying that Gacic was likely to commit the same crime after he leaves the prison.

Minister Katica added that Gacic is operating alone, but the police is not excluding any option.

Experts say Gacic is very dangerous. A court expert psychiatrist said he is a religious fanatic who is always ready to fight and highly persistent in executing his intentions, regardless of how deviant they are. In spite of all the warnings, he was released from prison, without undergoing any psychiatric treatment.

“Both police and citizens are suffering from this decision. We need to analyse this situation. I know of similar cases from the time when I was a police inspector. Some dangerous inmates used to get weekends off when they’d commit crimes,” Katica told N1. “The State needs to analyse how no one from the field was able to predict this situation.”

when asked if he could say how many persons like him are walking freely among the general population, the Minister said that no institution has that information and police recommendations do not affect court decisions.

Professor at the Faculty of Criminology and Security Studies at Sarajevo University, Jasmin Ahic, told N1 that Gacic had probably changed his physical appearance.

“The problem is that when he killed his mother, we saw that he meticulously planned that murder. After killing his mother, he waited for two hours, making an escape plan to Montenegro where he was arrested. He must have had a plan when he killed the man in Konjic because he left his cellphone,” Professor Ahic said. “In the case of the murder of the police officer, he had less time, but still enough to plan his escape from there as well. He’s probably monitoring social networks and that’s why it’s very hard for the police to act without a plan.”