prijava
SARAJEVO, April 19 (FENA) - The Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina confirmed today that it is continuing its work in the 'Orthodox relic' case and that activities within the framework of international legal assistance are underway.
"Regarding the case known to the public as the Orthodox icon affair, we can answer that the case is still ongoing and that activities are being implemented within the framework of international legal assistance," FENA learns from the Prosecutor's Office of BiH.
In the interest of the case, at this time, they say that they could not provide more information.
This is a case that the Prosecutor's Office of BiH opened on December 18, 2020, in order to carry out checks and examine allegations about how the gilded Christian Orthodox icon ended up in BiH, as it is claimed to "represent the cultural treasure of Ukraine", and was presented as a gift by the Chairman of the Presidency of BiH Milorad Dodik to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (RF) Sergei Lavrov, who was at the time in a visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Earlier, the Prosecutor's Office, upon inquiries from the media, announced that the acting prosecutor assigned to the case was taking activities to collect evidence and examine witnesses and that a request for international legal assistance had been sent to the competent institutions.
It should be reminded that the mentioned icon was presented as a gift to Lavrov during his visit, on December 14 last year, by Dodik after the meeting they held in East Sarajevo.
According to media reports, it is suspected that the icon, which on its back carries the seal of the Ukrainian Committee for Culture from 1920, has been taken out of Luhansk, a city in eastern Ukraine located on the territory that has been under the control of pro-Russian forces since 2014.
In this regard, the Embassy of Ukraine in Bosnia and Herzegovina sent a note to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of BiH, asking for detailed information on why and how the 300-year-old Ukrainian Orthodox relic ended up as a gift for Lavrov.
The news of this event, which the media called a kind of diplomatic and international scandal, traveled all over the world, and in the meantime, the head of Russian diplomacy returned the icon to the person who gave it to him.
(FENA) S. R.
