sign of her being followed. On the night of her death, Dando's BBC colleague Nick Ross said on Newsnight that retaliatory attacks by criminals against police, lawyers and judges were almost unknown in the UK. Forensic examination of the cartridge case and bullet recovered from the scene of the attack suggested that the weapon used had been the result of a workshop conversion of a replica or decommissioned gun. It was argued that a professional assassin would not use such a poor quality weapon. The police therefore soon began to favour the idea that the killing had been carried out by a crazed individual acting on an opportunist basis. This assumed profile of the perpetrator led to the focus on George. Cold case reviews by the police after 2008 concluded that Dando was killed by a professional assassin in a "hard contact execution". Pressing the gun against her head would have acted as a suppressor — muffling the sound of the shot and preventing the killer from being splattered with blood. In 2012 a cold case review named Serbian warlord Arkan as a suspect, although by this time he had died. Yugoslav connection In early 1999 the UK and NATO were involved in the Kosovo War, opposing Serbia. Immediately after the Dando killing a number of telephone calls were made to the BBC and other media outlets claiming responsibility for the killing on behalf of Serb groups. These calls stated that the murder was revenge for the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia, and threatened further killings. These calls were not judged wholly credible and may have been hoaxes. Nevertheless, at George's first trial, his defence barrister, Michael Mansfield, proposed that the Serbian warlord Arkan had ordered Dando's assassination in retaliation for the NATO bombing of the RTS headquarters. Mansfield suggested that Dando's earlier presentation of an appeal for aid for Kosovar Albanian refugees may have attracted the attention of Bosnian-Serb hardliners. Dando's appeal for aid for the Kosovar Albanian refugees had been shown on television three weeks before her murder. In 2019 it was reported that the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) had given an intelligence report to the Dando murder enquiry claiming that the murder was in retaliation for the RTS bombing and Arkan had ordered the killing. The report highlighted a possible connection between the bullet used to kill Dando and bullets used in assassinations in Germany,