Croatian Police Arrest Suspect for Torturing Prisoners of War

The site of the 1991 Ovcara Farm massacre in Croatia. Photo: Perun/Wikipedia.

Croatian police said on Wednesday that they have arrested a suspect in their ongoing investigation into war crimes committed against prisoners of war at Ovcara Farm near Vukovar, where more than 200 prisoners were tortured and killed in November 1991.

“As a result of further police investigations… on November 3, 2020, police officers arrested a Croatian citizen in the area of [the village of] Negoslavci,” police said in a statement.

Last month, police arrested and charged two former Serb paramilitaries, both Croatian citizens, with committing crimes against prisoners of war at Ovcara Farm.

It is suspected that the two men were among a group who formed a line in front of a hangar at Ovcara Farm and forced the prisoners – captured and detained members of the Croatian Army, Croatian military volunteers and a small number of civilians – to pass through it while being beaten.

Police said the third suspect, who was arrested on Tuesday, is a man who was born in 1974.

They said that an investigation established “a well-founded suspicion” that the suspect, then a 17-year-old, together with the two previously arrested suspects and members of Serb paramilitary units, participated in the brutal physical abuse of prisoners.

“Police will submit a special report to the Osijek County State’s Attorney’s Office, as a supplement to the earlier criminal charge [of the two other men],” the police statement said.

Vukovar was besieged from late August 1991 by the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serb paramilitaries.

The defenders of the Croatian town surrendered on November 18, after which all the non-Serb population was expelled, and a number of prisoners of war and civilians were deported to prisons and detention camps in Serbia, while more than 200 people were executed at the nearby Ovcara Farm and in other places.

Over 3,000 soldiers and civilians died during the siege of Vukovar and its aftermath, 86 of them children.

The highest-ranking officers to be convicted of crimes related to Vukovar were the former Yugoslav People’s Army officers Veselin Sljivancanin and Mile Mrksic, who were tried by the Hague war crimes tribunal.

Sljivancanin was found guilty in 2007 and then returned to Serbia after serving two-thirds of his sentence in 2011.

Mrksic was also found guilty in 2007 and died while serving his sentence in Portugal in 2015.