Croatia Overturns Rebel Serb Commander’s Acquittal

The Croatian Supreme Court. Photo: BIRN.

The Croatian Supreme Court said on Friday that it has overturned an earlier court decision acquitting Marko Carevic, the commander of the Territorial Defence forces of the self-declared wartime Serbian Autonomous Region of Krajina, of ordering the murder of an elderly Croatian man in the village of Kablar in October 1991.

The Supreme Court said that the first-instance court’s conclusion that it could not be reliably established that Carevic, now 66, ordered the killing of the civilian “do not stand”, and ordered a retrial.

The court meanwhile upheld the verdict convicting the second defendant in the case, 64-year-old former Serb paramilitary fighter Ljuban Linta, who is currently unavailable to the Croatian authorities.

The murder was committed in October 1991, during the occupation of Kablar, a settlement that is part of the city of Karlovac, during the conflict between the Croatian Army and the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serb paramilitary units.

According to the indictment, members of a Serb paramilitary group detained 83-year-old Ivan Grgic in the garden of his family home and took him to Carevic.

After questioning the elderly man, Carevic told one of the Serb unit’s members to kill him. But he did not want to do it, so Carevic issued the same order to Linta, prosecutors alleged.

Members of the unit then shot the man dead.

In 2019, Rijeka County Court found Linta guilty and sentenced him to ten years in prison for murdering the man, while Carevic was acquitted of ordering the murder.

Linta has both Croatian and Serbian citizenship and his last reported address was in Serbia, so he was tried and sentenced in absentia.