Two-hour strike at Sarajevo University Clinical Centre over violent incident

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Employees of the Sarajevo University Clinical Centre held a two-hour strike on Thursday over an incident that took place on Tuesday - a man threatened a doctor with a gun because the clinic did not medicine for his sick daughter.

The victim, Dr. Edo Hasanbegovic, explained what happened.

“The father of the girl suddenly, without reason, took out a revolver – not a plastic one, but a real one and there were witnesses there who started crying. He put the barrel on my neck. He said, ‘sign this, or I will kill you’,” he explained.

“I’m still shaking, I shouldn’t have come today at all, but I had to tell the public. That minute was like an eternity for me. The women around me began falling to the ground, it was … horror, lie a war movie,” he said, adding that then security guards and police officers arrived.

The employees now demand to be treated as public officials are according to law.

The Director of the Clinical Centre, Sebija Izetbegovic, told reporters that “this was not the first attack on employees” there.

“We looked at data from 2016 onward, and until today we have had 125 direct threats, 19 physical attacks and 106 very aggressive verbal attacks,” she said.

“We analysed the situation in this case and we want the public to know that this is a problem regarding a little patient who was prescribed medicine in Turkey,” Izetbegovic said, adding that it is up to the Institute for Healthcare of the Federation entity (FBiH) to acquire the medicine in question.

The Sarajevo University Clinical Centre has nothing to do with that process, she said.