Eight Croatian and two Serbian nationals have been detained on suspicion of being involved in the mafia-style murder of a high-profile Croatian journalist, police said on Thursday.
“Four people were detained on Wednesday in [the eastern] Vukovar-Srijem County while the others were arrested in Zagreb,” police official Krunoslav Borovec told journalists.
Ivo Pukanic, founder and editor-in-chief of the political weekly Nacional, and his marketing director were killed in a blast in downtown Zagreb last week.
The suspects were arrested in raids by special police because they were “extremely dangerous members of criminal circles,” Borovec said.
Police had to use force during the some of the arrests, leaving two suspects and two officers with minor injuries, he said, adding security forces were to search around a dozen apartments, houses and cars on Thursday.
“We expect that during these and other police operations we will find new evidence which will back a reasonable doubt that these are the perpetrators of the murder of Pukanic and [Niko] Franjic,” Borovec said.
Meanwhile, a lawyer identified three of the suspects as cousins Luka and Robert Matanic, and Amir Mafalani.
“Police informed me that the Matanics and Mafalani were arrested on suspicion of being responsible for the murder of Ivo Pukanic and that they want me to defend them,” lawyer Zoran Pilipovic told the state news agency HINA.
Robert Matanic, 31, returned to Croatia in May after spending more than eight months in prison in Bulgaria over a series of mafia murders there. He was released due to a lack of evidence, local media reported.
The daily Jutarnji List said the two Serbian nationals were detained near the border with Serbia while trying to prepare the escape of their Croatian accomplices. The two are close to one of Serbia’s most notorious mafia bosses, Sreten “Amsterdam” Jocic, the paper said.
Borovec declined to elaborate on the suspects’ identity, stressing police were cooperating with their counterparts from Bosnia and Serbia.
In Belgrade, Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said his police force had “significantly contributed to solving the Pukanic murder.”
The arrests came after Croatia’s new justice and interior ministers on Wednesday pledged to crack down on organized crime following a spate of mafia-style murders.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS