Isidora Ivković shot on the 10th floor: fifteen minutes in a neighbour’s flat, then a fatal shot

On the night of August 10, 2004, 19-year-old Isidora Ivković went to her neighbor Igor Radenović’s apartment and was shot in the head; she died six days later on August 16 after a long fight for her life. The case left relatives and investigators with unresolved questions about what happened during the roughly fifteen minutes she spent on the tenth floor.

Conflicting versions and a pistol found in the victim’s hand

Police who entered Radenović’s flat found a pistol in Isidora’s left hand and noted a gunshot wound to her left temple. Her father, however, has long insisted that his daughter was right-handed, a detail that helped fuel doubts about the official reconstruction. Neighbors said Radenović had run from the building after the shooting; he surrendered to investigators days later.

Radenović told investigators he had not intended to kill Isidora. According to his account, she came to his flat at about 21:30, stayed around fifteen minutes and he went toward the bathroom. While reaching for photographs he wanted to show her, he said he felt a pistol under some clothes in a cupboard — a CZ Beretta, 6.35 mm caliber — which a friend had allegedly left with him about a year earlier. He said he brought the gun back into the living room as a joke, the door banged against a wardrobe and the weapon discharged, striking Isidora.

The court rejected that explanation. In 2006 Radenović was convicted and sentenced to a single term of 12 years and six months’ imprisonment for the murder and for illegal possession of a loaded CZ Beretta. The judges concluded he knew the pistol was loaded, aimed it at her head and acted with intent, and they pointed to his behavior after the shooting — placing the gun in her hand, attempting to present the event as an accident, and fleeing the scene — as evidence that undermined his claims of an accident.

Despite the conviction, decisive questions remain unanswered: why was she shot, what precisely transpired between them during those minutes in the apartment, whether there had been an argument, and what the true nature of their relationship had been. The motive was never definitively established. Radenović was later included in an amnesty in 2012.

For the Ivković family the legal verdict confirmed that Isidora’s death was not a misfortune but a crime — yet it stopped short of delivering the full explanation they sought. “I do not feel hatred and I do not seek revenge, I only want the truth and a just punishment for this crime,” Isidora’s father said at the time.

Photo: press material from the event