Investigative files shed new light on the dangerous dealings of a German police informant whose life was cut short by a brutal murder.
One summer afternoon in June 2022, five men calmly walked into a ground-floor apartment in Marbella, a swanky beach town on Spain’s sunny Mediterranean coast.
Only four of them would come out alive.
The following evening, the battered corpse of Aleksandar Kolundzic, a 33-year-old Serbian who had settled in Germany, was found by a property manager gagged and bound to a chair inside the apartment, which sits in a gated residential complex a few minutes’ walk from the sea. According to Spanish police, Kolundzic’s head had been wrapped in plastic and he was beaten for hours with golf clubs before being shot in the head.
“It was a full-blown execution,” a Spanish police source who was involved in the investigation told OCCRP. (The officer was authorized to speak to the press, but not to be identified by name.)
Nearly two years after the horrific killing, the first suspect in connection with the murder was extradited from Turkey to Spain and detained there in April. Spanish police allege that the 32-year-old German citizen of Turkish origin, identified here as Tolga S., was part of the group that tortured and murdered Kolundzic. While authorities hunt for the other suspects, Tolga S. is being investigated for murder, illegal detention, illegal possession of weapons, and membership in a criminal organization.
Both Kolundzic and his suspected killer were allegedly involved in organized crime, according to Spanish and German authorities. But there was one big difference: Kolundzic was also a police informant.
Alongside partners Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, and ZDF, OCCRP has pieced together new details about Kolundzic’s dangerous double life as an alleged drug trafficker and a collaborator with German police, and how it ended in his gruesome murder.
The reporting, which builds on revelations first by German broadcasters WDR and NDR, is based on thousands of documents reporters obtained from German prosecutors’ investigation into the murder, as well as court case files and interviews with police in Germany and Spain.
While Kolundzic was a regular visitor to Marbella — he had even registered at a local gym under a false name — he chiefly resided outside Frankfurt in the city of Offenbach, according to the German investigation into his death.
Known to his friends as Goran, he lived in Offenbach with his wife, who also hailed from his hometown of Novi Sad in northern Serbia. They had two children, and were expecting a third, when Kolundzic was killed.
In testimony given to German police, Kolundzic’s wife said her husband worked as a driver for a caregiving service and trained regularly in a martial arts gym. While she mentioned that he had occasional arguments with other men after a few drinks, she was not aware of any serious threats, or what her husband did when he was traveling, which was often to Spain.
She appeared to have no idea about his other profession: working as a confidential informant for Frankfurt police since at least 2018.
It is unclear how the collaboration started, but Kolundzic was considered by German police to be a “V-person,” the term used for an insider who secretly provides intel to authorities. The V refers to the German words for connection (Verbindung) and trust (Vertrauen).
According to the testimony of his police handlers in Frankfurt, Kolundzic told two officers of his plans to go to Spain to meet Tolga S., whom he claimed was a drug trafficker.
The handlers testified that Kolundzic told them that Tolga S., known by associates as “the fat one,” had been sending trucks carrying hundreds of kilograms of marijuana to Germany on a weekly basis. While the exact nature of their relationship is not known, Kolundzic said he had previously met Tolga S., according to his main handler.
Spanish police said the pair met again at a beach bar in Marbella the day before the murder.Precisely why the four men turned on Kolundzic the following day, and in such brutal fashion, is still under investigation. In their press statement, Spanish police said that “disagreements between the parties” had led to the victim’s hours-long torture.
The Spanish police source involved in the investigation told OCCRP it appeared the attackers wanted to extract information from Kolundzic.
“You don’t torture a person so savagely just to settle a score or a debt,” he said.
German police also found that messages were sent from Kolundzic’s phone on the evening he was tortured.
It is unclear whether Kolundzic himself typed the messages, which were sent after a video had already been circulated to people he knew, showing him alive but tied to a chair, with his legs wrapped in foil, and a plastic sheet laid out underneath.
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