CAT/C/35/D/174/2000 Page 8 summon and examine certain witnesses, including the complainants themselves, and to seek clarification of the remaining forensic inconsistencies. By letter of 28 January to the President of the District Court, the complainants criticized that only one of their requests, i.e. the interrogation of the police inspectors, had been complied with. They also challenged that the authorities persistently refused to state the time of their son’s death, that no explanation had been given for the numerous bruises on the deceased’s body, that the Institute of Forensic Medicine had refused to hand out any photographs of the deceased and that its forensic findings were intended to conceal their son’s abuse by the police, that M. K. had given three different versions of the incident to the investigating judge, the complainants, and her friends, respectively, and that not a single pedestrian on the busy streets facing apartment no. 82 had witnessed their son jumping out of the window. 2.20 By decision of 17 February 1998, 4 the Belgrade District Court found that the absence of any physical contact between the police inspectors and the deceased had been established on the basis of the concurring statements of J. J., Z. P. and M. L., the report of the investigating judge, as well as the police report of 19 April 1994, and the findings and opinions of the experts from the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Belgrade Faculty of Medicine dated 22 November 1994 and 27 November 1996. It concluded that there were no grounds for conducting an investigation against the charged police inspectors for the criminal offence of murder. 2.21 On 13 March 1998, the complainants appealed to the Supreme Court of Serbia and Montenegro and, on 23 March, they supplemented their reasons of appeal. They challenged that the District Court had failed to address their arguments or the objections raised by Prof. Dr. Z. S., an internationally renowned expert selected by the United Nations for autopsies conducted on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, while merely relying on the contradictory findings of the commission of forensic experts and on the un-scrutinized statements of M. K., as well as of the charged inspectors themselves, against one of whom criminal proceedings had previously been instituted for similar conduct. No fingerprints of the deceased had been found in apartment no. 82; the cables attached to the radiator had not even been examined for his biological traces. 2.22 By decision of 21 May 1998, 5 the Supreme Court of Serbia in Belgrade rejected the complainants’ appeal as unfounded. It endorsed the findings of the Belgrade District Court, considering that the commission of experts, in its supplementary findings and opinions of 27 November 1996, responded to all objections raised by the complainants’ lawyer and by Dr. Z. S. in a precise manner. The complaint: 3.1 The complainants claim that the State party failed to proceed to a prompt an impartial investigation of their son’s death and alleged prior torture, in violation of article 12, although the forensic evidence submitted by the complainants strongly suggested that their son was the victim of an act of torture within the meaning of article 1 of the Convention. 4 5 See Belgrade District Court, Decision of 17 February 1998, Ki. No. 898/97 (Kv. No. 99/98). See Supreme Court of Serbia in Belgrade, Decision of 21 May 1998, Kž. II 224/98.