The facts are, unfortunately, bloody and indisputable: media publisher Ivo Pukanić and the head of marketing of Zagreb's "Nacional" were killed last Thursday evening, October 23, in the courtyard of the editorial parking lot in the center of Zagreb, after an explosive hidden near a motorcycle was activated at the moment when they Pukanić and Niko Franjić were close to Pukanić's parked "Lexus", or even had already sat in that car.
FRIENDS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE LAW: Ivo Pukanić
The Croatian police, by the time of writing this text (Tuesday evening), have detained about thirty people who are suspicious for some reason or who could (due to their skill in setting up explosive devices) have some knowledge about the assassination, and along the way they shot at the public some kind of photo robot that as if he came out of a Cort Maltese comic at best, or better Alan Ford, on the basis of which, according to them, at least the last link in the crime, the person who brought the "explosive motorcycle" into the yard of "Nacional", or a person who ran away from that area after the explosion and the evident death of two people.
Today, almost a week after the assassination, everything else is officially unknown, just as the still unsolved murder of the daughter of the Zagreb lawyer Zvonimir Hodak (and the important vice-president of the Croatian government at the time Franja Tuđman Ljerka Mintas Hodak), the young lawyer trainee Ivana, who was killed ten days earlier in the house of the parents' apartment.
PUKI: Ivo Pukanić, for friends and acquaintances of Puka - unlike "collateral damage", the murdered Franjić, apparently a man with a rich biography who only recently decided to continue his life, after America and Chile, in his native Croatia - from his very professional beginnings, he is a colorful character to say the least. A Tito Fund scholarship holder, the son of poor parents, in the early 90s he began to make his way into the media world, first by painting girls and other girls who saw themselves on stage, and in the mid-90s, together with a group of ambitious journalists and editors, he founded the weekly "Nacional". This newspaper, it cannot be disputed, attacked Tudjmanism and the regime of the Great Leader Franja in one of its periods, until the moment when the original founders - tricked or gave up - left the story and left the matter to the lovable and slightly arrogant Pukanić. To this day, it is not known who from the previous owners (among whom are well-known names such as Denis Kuljiš, Jasna Babić and a few others) bought the property (measured by the initial deposit of thousands of marks), but those in the know assume that it was one of Tuđman's bankers from The Dubrovnik bank, which collapsed after the tycoon era, taking all the culprits of the great looting of Croatia that took place in those years into the "wrath of history".
In those years, Puki's "Nacional" was also at the forefront of democracy in Croatia: he unmasked Tuđmanism and publicized massive affairs, the "de-democratized" Mesić and other unfit characters from the Croatian scene became close to him, and there were also some texts about notorious war crimes which until then were, according to the interpretation of the President of the Supreme Court Vice Vukojević, incomprehensible because "a Croat in a defensive war cannot commit a crime" (and let alone wartime). In the years after that, however, "Nacional" was classified mainly as a newspaper of the "other Croatia", the criminal one, which culminated in the unsuccessful trial against the criminal group in 1999, and the alleged Croatian mafia peppered with sounding names. Some of the names he swore by, such as his father Hrvoje Petrač and his three sons, one of whom was convicted of kidnapping the son of his alleged rival, General Tomislav Zagorec, and some others, Puki never renounced. Not even at the moment when, recently, Zagorec - whose indictment (they say: shaky!) accuses him of "smearing" the diamonds with which Croatia was supposed to be armed in the 90s - was extradited from Austria to Croatia, nor when Petrač, extradited from Greece to the Croatian police, wrote letters in which he called the Croatian prime minister a "smranader", which his friend Puki regularly published.
It is difficult to explain to the average reader the character and work of Puki without a lot of facts, but let's add this: he was undeniably an excellent photographer of naked girls who aspired to an international career; it is indisputable that not a single text he wrote could have been printed without considerable effort by the editor, and it is indisputable that the Croatian Journalists' Association was impressed by his interview with the escaped Hague fugitive, General Anto Gotovin in 2003, and awarded him an annual award, regardless of the existence of suspicions that the interview was even fabricated. Maybe not, if we, as the public, believe the suspected war criminal: Gotovina recently sent a telegram of condolences from Scheveningen for Pukanić's death.
FACTS: Pukanić's public life has been marked by many scandals in the last (many) months: from the aforementioned general Zagorec, a privileged importer of illegal weapons, to a man who went from being an unknown general to being suspected of machinations with state diamonds. Diamonds, according to some (parliamentary representative Damir Kajin), originate from the time of the so-called NDH, from martyred Jews, and allegedly, according to some sources, Church U Croats took out from the treasury so that Croatia could arm itself. And Zagorec was that great Croatian arms dealer.
His first friend, and then his enemy, was Hrvoje Petrač: a Croatian tycoon who rose from a small socialist figure who lived "according to man" to the position of tycoon: there is nothing in Zagreb and its surroundings that he did not buy, and in the cult cafe "Čarli" ( where President Mesić also comes for "coffee with the citizens" on Saturdays) and today, when he gets a weekend off from prison, they stand up to his appearance calmly.
His son recently, in January of this year, just got out of prison where he was serving time for the kidnapping of Zagorec's son; to a "Vremena" source, he then stated: "Puki is a pussy that won't last long." To our source at the time, it sounded more like an objective assessment than a threat.
At that time, Puki was still in the public eye: he committed his wife - with whose capital he started the business (her mother was a serious auctioneer in Germany and loved her son-in-law) - in a psychiatric institution, apparently through abuse and acquaintances with "to those with whom it is necessary". Almost the whole country took part in that shameful story, from journalists to politicians, but also human rights fighters, so the former and then head of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Žarko Puhovski and Ivo Banac, quarreled; one believed more in Ivo Pukanić, the other in his wife Mirjana Pukanić, and the public remained indifferent, even after Puki's Mirjana - after all the terrible and public dramas - went to a safe house, where she is still today.
THEORIES: In April of this year, Pukanić claimed that there was an attempt to assassinate him, and few believed it. Despite the numerous strange details of the alleged assassination, today, after his actual violent death, many in Croatia say: "Sorry, Puki, that we didn't believe you." Whoever thought about his story (and they say that even the police did not take his fears and suspicions seriously ), there is something that connects the allegedly unsuccessful and today actual assassination of Ivo Pukanić: then he himself "targeted" the alleged cocaine dealers of his mentally "deluded" wife, today - a few days after assassination - that's what the editorial office of "Nacional" does.
In the first issue of that weekly, published after the murder of her husband, this Tuesday, the public put forward three theses: the most likely, the murder was ordered by his wife, who is indebted to her dealers, all in order to inherit his property, then pay it off, and all those who killed him before for several months, they labeled him as a domestic abuser, "bloodied their hands" (followed by the sounding names of journalists in "Nacional's" text). However, there are no facts to support this, because Pukanić's wife (the divorce hearing was supposed to take place a few days after he was brutally murdered in an assassination attempt) according to the same weekly, has no assets, except possibly an apartment in Zagreb's Ilica registered in her name before that her late mother decided to leave all her property to her granddaughter, Mirjana and Iva's minor daughter. When it comes to "Nacional", whose capital allegedly includes Mirjana's money, the question is whether Ivo Pukanić sold all his share, or whether he still had 25 percent of the shares, which, according to that theory, she would divide equally with her daughter honours.
The theory that was immediately evaluated as completely silly is the one according to which there is a Serbian element in the whole story: the same Sretko Kalinić, who here in Serbia is facing at least two 35-year prison sentences (assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić and the sentence against the "Zemun clan"), it is unlikely that - according to the information of the MUP of Serbia, but also of the fraternal MUP of Croatia - he got on that motorcycle and personally supervised Pukanić's death.
That thesis, like the next one - that Stanko Cane Subotić was involved in the whole thing - is unfounded, as it seems now. It is easiest to blame the Serbs, that is, the Serbian criminal clans, as if there are no such "artists" in Croatia; and there are so many of them. The story about Subotic comes from a completely different milieu (see box) and the fact that Pukanić was killed by some "others", the tobacco mafia, his ex-wife, journalists who did not believe him (after all) and who knows what else, only faithfully reflects the story in where Croatia as a country and society is today.
Namely, that country (like the others created on the ruins of the former Yugoslavia) organized criminal groups and organizations from the beginning, in which those-in-the-know involved everyone they could, from ministers to journalists. In the early 90s, the same Croatian state followed the policy of right and wrong blood cells, so it kicked out from the police, the judiciary and the prosecutor's office (and everything else, which is not important for this story) those who do not suit it. So, for example, one Toni Nobilo or Čedo Prodanović escaped from the prosecution: when years later they found themselves in the process of a "criminal organization", it turned out that one of the prosecutors was a close mafia godmother, that these same mobsters were produced in the cream of society and the elite, and that Nobilo and Prodanović, as the only professionals, were the only ones able to do their job properly.
The murdered Pukanić, in his last column published in "Nacional", wrote that, thanks to the media, there is a "collective national paranoia of some kind of mafia" in Croatia. In the same issue, for Ivana Hodak - the daughter of the lawyer of the mentioned General Zagorec, who was in a love relationship with the lawyer Hrvoj Petrač, Puki's friend - it was written, unprovoked, that she was a victim of robbers, not the mafia.
It is very interesting that the "Lexus" car was driven by the murdered Ivana Hodak, as well as the murdered Ivo Pukanić; in the last issue of "Nacional" signed by Pukanić, a photo of her "Lexus" was published, which - according to stories circulating on Croatian portals and media - costs one hundred thousand euros, excluding VAT.
The father of the murdered Ivana may have had the money for that car in his well-established law office. Ivo Pukanić was killed next to his "Lexus", and no one asked where he got it from, who this year also bought a house in Zagreb's Ribnjak at a price of eight and a half million euros.
And maybe in those figures and tax loopholes, in which state crime that has been going on for two decades is woven, is the solution to the riddle of who killed those golden children of Croatia's future.
And maybe that's why we won't get answers to the questions of who killed Ivana Hodak and Ivo Pukanić.
According to the knowledge of the Croatian police, Ivo Pukanić and Niko Franjić were killed by a remotely activated device containing about 2 kg of plastic explosive PEP-500. The activation method is not yet known, but there are not many ways. Sections of the press bid up to 5 kg, but in that case the performance would be significantly more devastating. Others immediately asserted that the explosives came from Serbia, but it is common knowledge that the former JNA left hundreds of tons of explosives on the territory of the former SFRY without any record or charge, so it is available on all black markets.
Such a device can be activated remotely in several ways. In modern times, an infrared remote control (like for televisions) is preferred, but it is somewhat risky because of the possibility that someone nearby has one. The preferred way is the mobile phone, but it requires a bit more expertise that we won't go into. Let's just say that there is a way to set the mobile phone so that it activates the explosive device only and exclusively upon a call or SMS message from a single number. Remote detonation gives the perpetrator the advantage of choosing the moment of the explosion, unlike other methods (mechanical, cheap and simple) in which there is no choice once the device is installed. This would mean that the perpetrator was in visual contact with the target - or that there was someone in such contact who would tell him when to activate the device, which provides the possibility of analyzing contacts made through mobile phone base stations in the area.
M. V.
In the colorful career of Ivo Pukanić, there is one somewhat forgotten corner. This is the famous "Tobacco Affair" from 2001, an affair that was followed by lawsuits, breakups of friendships, business upheavals and regroupings. Today, it is reliably known that the affair was launched by the joint efforts of Ivo Pukanić and William Montgomery, the then US ambassador to all our countries. Bill Montgomery's motive was largely political, less business; Pookie's motivation was reversed. In an attempt to slow down and even completely prevent the removal of Montenegro from the then FR Yugoslavia, Montgomery supplied Ivo Pukanić with intelligence data that it was already clear at first glance that no investigative journalism could have obtained. "Nacional" supplemented that information with its own creative interpretations, stretched beyond any reasonable measure, accusing Stanko Subotić, known as Cane, of being the "head of the Balkan mafia", of having killed dozens of people, etc. This later led to a series of unpleasant court cases in which "Nacional" fared badly. In addition, Cane Subotić demonstratively returned his Croatian citizenship.
In the end, it was not possible to prove that Djindjic had anything to do with cigarette smuggling, nor that Cane Subotic was a murderer and "head of the Balkan mafia". He was and remains only a wholesaler of cigarettes, whose responsibility for them ends the moment the sticks touch Montenegrin soil, and as far as we know, Cane Subotić refused Hrvoj Petrač's once generous offer to join the cigarette wholesale business, with the statement: "I don't do business with gangsters There is another angle: Đinđić's regulation of the cigarette trade damaged certain large companies, including the Americans and TDR from Rovinj, close to his heart. various actors of this affair.
The statement of Subotic's lawyer, Slobodan Budak, to "Vremen" confirms these allegations: Pukanić's "Nacional" attacked him in more than a hundred articles since 2001, most of the process (publishing corrections and defamation, most of which the Croatian judiciary allowed to expire) Subotic received , and when Subotic personally appeared before the Croatian courts after two years, there was no one on the other side - the one that slandered him.
MV
