Prosecutor gives up on little Tamara

Prosecutor Natasha Godjovska, who was supposed to prove the system’s mistake for the death of young Tamara Dimovska, who died while awaiting surgery abroad, was a no show at yesterday’s court hearing and withdrew from the case. According to unofficial information, the prosecutor withdrew due to personal reasons, and the prosecution will appoint a new prosecutor who will continue to represent the indictment.
“Due to new circumstances arising from the previous to today’s main hearing, the public prosecutor handling the case considered that there was a legal impediment to further proceeding with the case. For these reasons the request for exemption has been submitted. After accepting the request for exemption, another public prosecutor from the BPPO Skopje will be appointed, and the procedure will continue with its  usual course”, informs the prosecution.
Although the prosecutor will be replaced, the trial will not start from scratch. In February, young Tamara’s mother, Zhaklina Dimovska, came to court and confronted members of both committees, who were most responsible for the negative response. The mother’s testimony turned into a show and there was shouting and yelling in the courtroom. The atmosphere was tense right from the very start, as the mother’s anger towards the indictees was felt, as well as the attitude of the accused that they were sitting unjustly on the defendant’s bench. Tamara’s mother told the court all she was going through to try to cure her child, and the lawyers of the defendants in cross-examination were trying to impose a thesis that the mother did not regularly bring her daughter for check-ups, and that even in her statement to the prosecution she had mistaken the her daughter’s date of death.
An indictment has been filed against Maja Parnadzieva-Zmejkova and Xhemaili Mehazi, as directors of the Health Insurance Fund Vladimir Popovski, Aleksandar Chaparoski, Liljana Tozija, Natalija Dolnenec-Baneva and Nikola Gramatikovski, who are members of the first treatment abroad of little Tamara, and against Aleksandar Stojanovic, Shaban Memeti, Riste Simeonov, Elena Trpkovska and Aspazija Sofijanova, as members of the second instance commission which confirmed the first instance decision.
The prosecution found that both the first and second instance commissions, as the basis for their decision not to send the girl to medical treatment abroad, took note of the then minister’s statement that patients with spine deformity would not go abroad because of the possibility of performing such surgeries at the Clinic of Orthopedic Diseases in Skopje, although at that time there were still no conditions in Macedonia for such operations. The girl’s family now lives in Slovenia, and her grandfather was convicted of shooting at Todorov. The first court hearing was scheduled for June last year, but after eight months there is no epilogue.

(FFS)