Verdicts in the trial of six men charged with the murder of the Nacional political weekly co-owner, Ivo Pukanic, and his business associate Niko Franjic, will be made known on November 3 at 10 am, slightly more than two years after Pukanic's murder and nearly nine months after the start of the trial, Zagreb County Court Judge Ivana Krsul said on Wednesday.
On the last day of the trial on Wednesday, the accused made their closing addresses reiterating that they were not guilty of the murder and asking to be acquitted.
Pukanic, a reporter with high media visibility, was killed on 23 October 2008 in the explosion of a bomb attached to a scooter parked by his car outside the Nacional building in Zagreb. Franjic was a collateral victim.
Shortly after the murder, the news of which was carried by many foreign media, a police operation was launched resulting in the arrest of the cousins Robert and Luka Matanic, Amir Mafalani and Slobodan Djurovic.
At the end of last year, Zeljko Milovanovic, who under the indictment parked the scooter with the bomb by Pukanic's car, was arrested in Belgrade where he is now standing trial together with Milenko Kuzmanovic and Sreten Jocic, who allegedly organised the murder on behalf of an unknown person linked with an international tobacco smuggling ring. Two days before the start of the Zagreb trial, Bojan Guduric turned himself in to the police in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, after which he was transferred to Croatia.
After a year-long investigation, on 26 October 2009, the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK), indicted the Matanic cousins, Mafalani, Milovanovic, Guduric and Djurovic for murder for gain, crime against public safety, and for conspiring to form a criminal group.
Under the indictment, Pukanic's murder was organised with the aim of preventing him from giving to the media in Croatia and neighbouring countries information on the activities of a number of criminal groups in those countries.
The criminal group that killed him was allegedly formed in Serbia in the first half of 2008 by Sreten Jocic, who paid 1.5 million euros to have Pukanic killed. Jocic's close friend Slobodan Djurovic was indicted for serving as a link between Jocic and the perpetrators of the crime.
During the trial that started on February 3 under tight security measures and which together with the summer recess lasted slightly less than nine months, numerous expert analyses, video and audio recordings, and text messages of the accused and of Pukanic were shown, and a number of witnesses were questioned.
Along with testimonies by the star witness Tomislav Marjanovic and businessman Ratko Knezevic, who claimed that the Montenegrin tobacco mafia was behind the murder, the recent testimony of Zagreb police officer Nenad Sipusic also caught the public's attention. Sipusic confirmed that Mafalani had told him a crime would be committed, but not where it would be committed, or who the victim and the perpetrator would be, so he did not report it to his superiors.
Before the end of the trial, USKOK submitted to the court an amended indictment against the six alleged killers which for the first time mentions Hrvoje and Novica Petrac as possible victims of the criminal group.
In his closing statement, a deputy head of USKOK, Slobodan Sasic, requested the highest prison sentence of 40 years for the accused, saying that the murder of Pukanic and Franjic was the most violent act in Croatia's history and a crime against journalistic freedoms and democracy.
The accused denied their guilt, and their defence teams said USKOK had failed to prove the existence of the criminal group.
