Marko Stalović – Those beatings haunt me

27 February 2023

In 2017, Marko Stalović reported his car as stolen to the police in Serbia. Instead of investigating the theft, the police assumed he was lying and tortured him for thirteen hours to try and force a confession.

Marko was made to kneel in a room surrounded by eight officers. The officers beat, kicked, and racially abused him. When he would not confess, an officer began whipping his outstretched hands with a leather whip. One officer put a plastic bag over his head and squeezed the air out, suffocating him. The same policeman also told him that if he did not confess they would electrocute him. Another cocked his gun, pointed it at him, and told him he would shoot him in the hand to give him “a memory that would stay with him for a lifetime”. The police officers also threatened to imprison his wife and told the couple that they had a car waiting to take their children to an orphanage. The officers told them that they did not have a right to call their lawyer and, after subjecting them to a polygraph test, the officers coerced them into signing documents they had not read and could not take away with them. Years after the traumatizing events Marko still has health problems, severe emotional stress, but also a strong will to win his case before the European Court of Human Rights.