Montenegrin media have announced Friday that the boss of the notorious "Skaljari" drug gang, Jovan Vukotic, has been executed in Turkey. 

Vukotic was shot by a motorcycle while he was driving a car, where his wife and daughter were inside the vehicle. Meanwhile, the Montenegrin police have not yet confirmed the death of the notorious boss. 

"Montenegro services are trying to get information and confirmation from colleagues in Turkey. However, the process is slow,” - said the Police Directorate.

Vukotic was on the run after Montenegrin judicial authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in September last year. He appears in Montenegrin police files and documents as one of the leaders of the drug gang based in the city of Kotor. In 2018, he denied involvement in drug trafficking. 

In December 2020, the Special State Prosecution charged Vukoti? with creating a criminal organization and preparing the murder of three members of the rival Kavac drug gang. 

According to the prosecution, Vukotic planned to kill Slobodan Kascelan, the alleged kingpin of the Kavac gang, and Veljko Belivuk and Marko Miljkovic, the leaders of another notorious gang from Serbia. 

Vukotic was charged as a result of evidence obtained from Sky EC communications, received and broadcast by French and Dutch police, of crimes including drug trafficking, murder and kidnapping. 

Skaljar's gang has been involved in a six-year war with Kavac's rival gang, also from Kotor. At least 40 people have been killed in Montenegro, Serbia, Austria and Greece in the conflict. Both gangs take their names from the neighborhoods of Kotor, a medieval town of around 20,000 inhabitants in Montenegro's Boka Bay. 

The conflict began in 2015 after 300 kilograms of cocaine disappeared from an apartment in Valencia, Spain, in 2014. In 2018, Vukotic was arrested in Turkey and extradited to Serbia, where the High Court in Belgrade sentenced him to 15 months in prison for using a forged Macedonian passport. 

In February 2020, he was extradited to Montenegro, where he was accused of attempted murder of members of Kavac's gang. But in July of that year the Supreme Court in Podgorica dropped the charges and he was released. 

The media reported that members of the rival gang tried to kill Vukotic while he was in prison in Montenegro after his extradition from Serbia. One of the victims of the six-year drug gang war was Vukoti?'s own father, Veselin, who was killed in Kotorr in March 2019.