Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
Marbella, Spain — Aleksandar Kolundzic, a 33-year-old Serbian man and police informant, was brutally murdered in an apartment in Marbella, Spain, in June 2022. His death revealed the dark and dangerous reality of his role as a double agent, involved both with law enforcement and the criminal underworld.
Kolundzic’s body was discovered gagged and bound to a chair inside a gated residential complex just a short walk from the beach. He had been beaten for hours with golf clubs and ultimately shot in the head, Spanish police said. “It was a full-blown execution,” an officer involved in the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told OCCRP.
Almost two years after the grisly murder, Spanish authorities have taken the first major step in the investigation. A suspect identified as Tolga S., a 32-year-old German citizen of Turkish descent, was extradited from Turkey to Spain in April and detained. Authorities allege Tolga S. was part of the group responsible for torturing and killing Kolundzic. He is currently being investigated for multiple charges, including murder, illegal detention, illegal possession of weapons, and involvement in a criminal organization. Police are continuing to search for the other suspects involved.
Both Kolundzic and his suspected killer reportedly had ties to organized crime, according to Spanish and German authorities, but there was a crucial distinction: Kolundzic was also working as a confidential informant for the German police.
Reporting from OCCRP, Der Spiegel, ZDF, and Paper Trail Media has pieced together new details about Kolundzic’s dangerous double life, based on thousands of documents from German prosecutors, case files, and interviews with police in both Germany and Spain.
A Double Life on the Edge
Kolundzic was valued by German police for providing key intelligence on criminal networks. However, testimonies from police and prosecutors suggested that he was involved in major drug deals and owed substantial sums of money to his criminal associates, potentially complicating his work as an informant. According to information obtained after his death, Kolundzic had reportedly met in Catalonia with individuals tied to the Kavač clan, a powerful Montenegrin mafia heavily involved in drug trafficking. In their press release following the arrest of Tolga S., Spanish police described Kolundzic as being “linked to Balkan criminal organizations.”
Legal and Operational Lapses
The Kolundzic case has shed light on ongoing debates in Germany about the use and oversight of confidential informants. Germany lacks a specific law governing informant use, and many legal experts have argued that stricter regulations are long overdue. Police, on the other hand, worry that such regulations could undermine a powerful investigative tool.
A new law governing informants is currently working its way through the legislative process. However, in practice, German police are already supposed to ensure that informants do “not themselves participate in criminal acts despite their proximity to the criminal milieu,” according to a 2017 legal opinion commissioned by Germany’s Justice Ministry. In 2020, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice also ruled that informants must not be allowed to commit crimes, though they could — with prosecutors’ consent — observe illegal activity to gather evidence on larger criminal operations.
Despite these rules, whether German police knew about Kolundzic’s deeper involvement in drug trafficking remains unclear. According to investigation files, German police were unable to retrieve deleted messages from Kolundzic’s lead handler’s phone. During his interrogation, the handler admitted he routinely erased chat histories as a security measure — an action carried out without oversight. The Frankfurt criminal investigation department declined to comment on whether any communication records involving Kolundzic existed in another format.
Questions Remain
The circumstances of Kolundzic’s murder raise questions about the relationship between the German police and their informants. Informants who were found to be actively dealing drugs on a large scale would no longer be considered appropriate collaborators, according to an experienced German police handler who spoke to Der Spiegel under anonymity.
Ultimately, Kolundzic’s secret life as both a criminal and a police informant ended with his violent execution. His death highlights the precarious line walked by informants embedded in the criminal underworld — a line that, in Kolundzic’s case, became fatally blurred.
