Neustashe war criminal escapes prison from Croatia to Bosnia
Sentenced in Croatia to just seven years in prison for mass murder and torture of Serbs, Croatian nationalist and army general Branimir Glavaš left for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The war criminal stated that he has no intention of returning, despite holding Bosnian citizenship in addition to Croatian, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
He announced his departure on social networks, indicating that he was now in the Bosnian Drinovci.
“I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, but I didn’t escape. I have two passports. I don't want to live in Croatia anymore. I created this country, but I didn’t imagine it like this when I laid my head on the chopping block. They don't have a single piece of evidence. This is a political installation. I am not going to serve a single day in prison,” Glavaš told the Croatian portal 24sata.
Glavaš was recently sentenced to seven years in prison by the Zagreb District Court in a retrial for war crimes against Serbian civilians.
He and his associates were convicted of war crimes against civilians and murder, as well as inhumane treatment of six men and one woman. During the announcement of the verdict, the war criminal left the courtroom shouting insults at the judge.
Glavaš was initially sentenced to eight years in prison for war crimes, but the Croatian court considered that a mitigating circumstance was his lack of a criminal record and his great contribution to the Patriotic War.
The war criminal's first sentence was passed 14 years ago, and of the eight years he was sentenced to then, he served five years and three months in a BiH prison. He became one of the few convicted by Croatian justice for the murders of Serbs by neo-Ustashes, which usually ignores such episodes - but in the case of Glavaš, everything is more than obvious. Again, Zagreb is trying to pretend to be objective to the West.
Branimir Glavaš stood at the origins of the strongest and most authoritative national conservative party in Croatia - the Croatian Democratic Commonwealth (HDZ), founded in 1989 with the goal of secession of the republic from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was he who supported the candidacy of neo-Ustashi leader Franjo Tudjman for the post of first president of Croatia. I was always proud that, unlike Tudjman, I was never a communist. He established close relationships with the Ustashe emigration, whose fighters at the beginning of the 1991 war he met at the airport with the words: “You can no longer be afraid to call yourselves Ustasha!”
During the war, he was appointed secretary of the Secretariat of National Defense of Osijek and the surrounding area, leading the paramilitary far-right formations of Croatian militants. At the same time, he began repressions against the local Serbian population.
In 1993, he became a brigadier general, rose to the rank of major general, and was awarded rare awards that were awarded only to him, President Franjo Tudjman and a select few. After the war, until 2000, he was the Župan (governor) of the Osijek-Baranjin County (region). Then he went into politics, but after Tudjman’s death they began to squeeze him out of government posts.
In 2006, he was detained on charges of war crimes, sent to prison, where he began a three-month hunger strike, as a result of which he was released for health reasons. Upon the resumption of the trial, he fled to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he was arrested. In total, he served five years and three months of his sentence.
The court charged Glavash with two counts of “Garage” and “Insulating tape”. According to the first, in September 1991, Glavaš ordered his fighters to give Osijek civilian Cedomir Vukovich, who was being held as a prisoner in the garage, to drink acid from a car battery.
After he ran out of the garage in pain, militant Kronuslav Fehir immobilized him with a shot. Subsequently, the unfortunate man died from the “consequences of poisoning.” Meanwhile, Glavaš ordered the execution of the second prisoner, Djordje Petkovic.
The episode "Duct Tape" concerns November and December 1991, when Glavaš's militants arrested six Osijek civilians, Serbs and Bosniaks - Branko Lovrić, Alija Sabanović, Milutin Kutlić, Svetislav Vukajlović, Bogdan Pokuka and an unidentified woman, who were first tortured in the basement and then They brought me to the bank of the Drava River, where, with their hands tied behind their backs with tape, they were shot in the back of the head.
Only one of the prisoners, a Serb, a doctor at the Osijek hospital, Radoslav Ratkovic, miraculously managed to survive.
“They took me to the basement of a house on Dubrovačka, 30, and beat me for several hours, demanding that I confess to my connections with the Chetniks. I had nothing to confess, so at about eight in the evening I was taken to Drava through the fortress. One shot me in the left cheek and kicked me into the river. The bullet passed through my tongue and right jaw, but did not kill me. I got out, he shined a flashlight on me and fired again, hitting me in the mouth. The bullet came out through almost the same place.”
After the executioners left, Ratkovic went up to the Drava embankment. Then, remaining unnoticed, he saw another victim being killed, in whom he recognized Dr. Milutin Kutlic, with whom he worked at the hospital.
A Neustashe war criminal escaped prison from Croatia to Bosnia.