It was in 2016 when the 22-year-old “German” Bastian Ifrim insidiously stabbed the police officer Damir Golobič on Ižanska street with a machete and then killed himself. Even today, it is still not clear why the migrant, who was mentally ill, killed Golobič – a son, husband, and an excellent and dedicated member of the police force.
On Wednesday, June 26th, 2016, a year after the outbreak of the refugee crisis, which also affected Slovenia, the villagers of the Žejno nad Čatežem ob Savi, a village near the border, noticed a stranger wandering around the village barefoot. They thought he was a refugee and called the police. After the first call, the patrol leader organized the operation so that a patrol in a white-and-blue police vehicle came with him, waiting outside the settlement, to search the area, and at the same time, another patrol, in which police officer Damir Golobič was also present, volunteered to do the same thing on the opposite side of the village.
The patrol, which included 30-year-old Golobič, found the 22-year-old German citizen sitting, or rather, half-lying, on the side of the road. As the police officer approached him, the German asylum seeker Bastian Ifrim suddenly swung a machete at him and stabbed him in the chest. The police discovered the identity of the perpetrator with the help of Europol, and so they found out that he was a mental patient who had already behaved in a self-destructive manner in the past and was often on the run. He was also a drug user. His name has been hidden for some time, which we have previously already written about.
Golobič was immediately administered first aid by his fellow police officers as they waited for the arrival of the ambulance, which took him to the Brežice hospital, where he sadly lost the fight for his life just before half past two in the afternoon. After the attack, Ifrim ran for about a hundred meters and then stabbed himself in the chest and bled to death.
Damir was barely 30 years old and had only gotten married a year before his death, and for a week after his murder, the police wore black. His family said their last goodbyes in Veliki Malenci, and the loss of his life is still just as shocking as it was back then.
Sara Kovač