The Zagreb County Court trial chamber conducting the trial of six men charged with the murder of Nacional weekly co-owner Ivo Pukanic and his associate Niko Franjic has not yet decided whether it will question as witnesses Croatian Chief State Prosecutor Mladen Bajic, the head of the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK), Dinko Cvitan, and Sreten Jocic aka Joca Amsterdam, who allegedly put out a contract on Pukanic's life.
At the start of the trial on Wednesday, the defence counsel for the firstdefendant, Robert Matanic, requested that the court also hear Bajic and Cvitan,as well as a former head of the police department for organised crime, TihomirKralj. Matanic's defence submitted the motion after their client said duringthe presentation of his defence that he was not guilty and that USKOK hadtricked him by offering him protected witness status in exchange for a falsetestimony.
The court will also decide at a later date on the motion to remove from thecase file a statement by the key witness Tomislav Marjanovic who had taken partin preparations for the murder, but who made a deal with USKOK, as well as acontroversial statement by Robert Matanic, who said yesterday that thestatement he had given during the pre-trial investigation was false and basedon what he suspected and not on his first-hand knowledge.
Apart from Jocic and his best man Slobodan Djurovic, who is also accused inthe case, Matanic had also linked retired general Vladimir Zagorec and StankoSubotic to Pukanic's murder.
The witnesses the court has allowed to testify include Matanic's formerattorney Zvonimir Zebec, who Matanic said had connected him with USKOK andpersuaded him to cooperate with it. Zebec will testify in the continuation ofthe trial on February 15.
In the course of the trial the court will also hear several protectedwitnesses, as well as Montenegrin businessman Ratko Knezevic, who has accusedhis best man, Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic and "his tobaccocartel", of Pukanic's murder.
The evidence to be presented in the trial includes recordings of phoneconversations between the indictees, and their mobile phones will be used toreconstruct their movement at the time when Pukanic's murder was planned andcarried out.
The prosecution will use those methods to challenge Matanic's claims thatUSKOK tricked him by offering him protected witness status and dropping of thecharges against him.
According to unofficial sources, Matanic's plan to turn the prosecution'sevidence failed because in his interviews with USKOK investigators he tried todownplay his role in the planning of the murder. That he was caught lying wasreportedly confirmed by recordings of phone conversations and a list of mobilephone calls, which proved among other things that he had met with the immediateperpetrators Zeljko Milovanovic and Bojan Guduric more frequently than headmitted while trying to make a deal with USKOK.
Under the indictment, the international gang which killed Pukanic and hisassociate Franjic as a collateral victim and planned two other murders in theZagreb area consisted of cousins Robert and Luka Matanic, Amir Mafalani, ZeljkoMilovanovic, Bojan Guduric and Slobodan Djurovic.
Guduric is in police custody in Sarajevo, awaiting extradition to Croatia,while Milovanovic is in Belgrade, where he is to be put on trial for the samecrime, alongside Milenko Kuzmanovic and Sreten Jocic, who allegedly paid EUR1.5 million to have Pukanic killed.
