Eight indicted over Croatian publisher's assassination

27/10/2009

Ivo Pukanic and a colleague at his newspaper were killed in a car bombing, almost exactly one year ago.

(AFP, AP, Reuters, DPA, Novinite, B92 - 26/10/09; B92, Blic - 23/10/09)

Croatian journalist and publisher Ivo Pukanic was murdered last year. [Getty Images].

Prosecutors in Serbia and Croatia charged eight suspects Monday (October 26th) over last year's mafia-style assassination of a prominent Croatian publisher and journalist.

Ivo Pukanic, co-owner and editor-in-chief of Croatian political weekly Nacional, was killed in a car bomb explosion in downtown Zagreb on October 23rd 2008, along with the newspaper's marketing director, Niko Franjic.

Serbian Special Prosecutor Miljko Radisavljevic said that Serb underworld boss Sreten Jocic, aka Joca Amsterdam, and two of his associates -- Zeljko Milovanovic and Milenko Kuzmanovic -- were indicted over the murder.

The evidence gathered during the seven-month probe into the case confirmed that the three "were working within an international organised crime group made up of Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian citizens, who organised and committed the crime in question", his office said in a statement.

Jocic, a Balkan drug kingpin, who was arrested in Belgrade on April 27th, is charged with ordering and organising the killing. At the time of his detention, the wealthy Belgrade businessman had already been indicted over the murders of two other men. He was placed under house arrest in 2006 and was living in a villa in Belgrade's posh Dedinje suburb that he rented from former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's widow, Mirjana Markovic.

Jocic allegedly paid "at least 1.5m euros" as a reward for Pukanic's murder.

Serbian prosecutors believe that the suspects placed the bomb that killed Pukanic, 47, on a scooter parked near the journalist's Lexus sedan. Milovanovic, aka Gavra, is suspected of having detonated the device. The blast, in which Pukanic and Franjic died and two passers-by were injured, also caused substantial damage.

Milovanovic, who was arrested in Belgrade in late May for suspected involvement in the case, is a former member of Serbia's notorious special police unit, known as the Red Berets. The unit, which fought in the Balkans in the early 1990s, was disbanded shortly after the March 2003 assassination of Serbia's first reformist prime minister, Zoran Djindjic -- one of the numerous crimes to which it has been linked.

Milovanovic was also among the suspects charged with the Pukanic case in the indictment issued by the Croatian Office for Prevention of Corruption and Organised Crime on Monday.

Four of them -- Amir Mafalani, Slobodan Djurovic and cousins Robert and Luka Matanic -- were arrested shortly after the murder, while the fifth -- Bojan Guduric -- remains on the run.

"The murder was organised to prevent Pukanic from revealing in press and electronic media in Croatia and neighbouring countries journalistic findings about actions of several criminal groups in the region and their mutual links," the AFP quoted the Croatian state attorney's office as saying.

The bomb attack against Pukanic came less than three weeks after Ivana Hodak, the 26-year-old daughter of a prominent lawyer, was shot dead near a police station in central Zagreb.

Radisavljevic said the aim of issuing the indictments simultaneously was not only to demonstrate the stepped-up co-operation between the Croat and Serb prosecutors, but also their determination to prosecute the most serious organised crimes.

According to Serbian media reports last week, a group believed to be linked to Jocic was planning to kill Serbian Justice Minister Snezana Malovic, over her push for the adoption of a law on confiscating assets gained through criminal activities.