Seven government officials, including a former mayor, from the northern Bosnian Brcko district were apprehended Monday as part of a joint police operation dubbed “Bingo.”  The men are accused of bribery, abuse of power, and counterfeiting government documents.

Dragan Pajić, who had been mayor of Brcko until his forced resignation last month, was arrested along with the district’s Head of Education Rizo Čivić.  In addition, Miron Buro, director of the Office for Public Property, and Sadem Plakalo, a clerk at this office, Samir Čorbadžić, Miodrag Trifković, Rino Bajer, all civil servants, were taken in for questioning.

The trial of seven individuals accused of organ trafficking began Tuesday in Kosovo.  Each of the seven, including doctors and a former official from the health ministry, has pled not guilty.

Prosecutors charge the defendants with luring victims from Moldova, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkey to Kosovo to sell their organs.  Each was charged with “one or more counts of trafficking in persons, organized crime, unlawful exercise of medical activity, and abusing official position or authority,” according to a statement from the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX), which is in charge of the trial.

The former director of Serbia’s largest lignite coal mine and 16 others were arrested today and charged with abusing their positions to embezzle between €10- and €12 million.

Dragan Tomic, former director of Kolubara coal mine, and 16 others associated with the company were arrested on Monday, Serbian Organized Crime Prosecutor Miljko Radisavljević told Tanjug news service.

Bosnian police arrested four individuals for organized crime in conjunction with human trafficking on Sunday in the northern Bosnian city of Doboj.

An Albanian Appeals court ruled Monday that Alfred Shkurti, convicted of running an organized crime syndicate in Albania, deserves a new trial.

The British government has secretly banned at least 60 Russian officials implicated in the death of whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky from entering the UK.

The move follows a similarly surreptitious decision by the American government in July, which in turn led to the Russian government creating a blacklist of US officials.

Seven major Mexican drug cartels are operating in over 1,000 US cities and the production and dissemination of drugs continues to increase, according to a new report released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

This assessment shows a striking increase from the previous report in 2009, in which the DOJ mentioned only 230 cities.

Protests all over Bulgaria subsided Wednesday, three days after they began, when the country’s Interior Ministry announced that a crime boss from Bulgaria’s second largest city Plovdiv had been apprehended.

Prosecutors in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) filed charges Thursday against Balkan businessman Zoran Copic.

Prosecutors from the Special Court in Bosnia’s predominantly Serb political entity, Republika Srpska, allege that Copic laundered money for indicted Serbian drug lord Darko Saric.

Five former members of the Serbian military’s Special Operations Unit (JSO) have been charged with committing perjury during the investigation into the murder of Serbian Prime Minister in Zoran Djindjic in 2003.