The Zagreb County Court on Monday continued the trial for the 2008 murder of Nacional weekly co-owner and reporter Ivo Pukanic and his associate Niko Franjic by playing secret audio recordings of phone conversations of some of the indictees, made by the anti-corruption agency USKOK, and by reading their e-mail messages, some of which mentioned Pukanic.
Most of the e-mail messages were sent by the accused Amir Mafalani to Robert Matanic, the alleged head of the group which killed Pukanic, and to Zeljko Kuzmanovic, who is awaiting trial in Belgrade for the same crime.
However, a message sent from Mafalani's electronic address to an unidentified recipient after the first attempt on Pukanic's life reads: "You've turned out to be more of a bigshot than Pukanic himself".
The e-mail messages read out at the trial backed claims Matanic made while presenting his defence, when he said that the day before their arrest, he and Mafalani had sent a letter to the Security-Intelligence Agency (SOA), saying that they had information that could be useful to the new government.
In USKOK's recordings of phone conversations it can be heard that Mafalani noticed that he was being followed by police investigators.
"Two assholes keep hanging out in front of my apartment building, they are now drinking coffee in a bakery across the street. They could have at least changed their clothes so that I can't recognise them," Mafalani complains to Matanic in a recording.
The evidence presented today also includes a taped conversation between Mafalani and Matanic's lawyer Zoran Pilipovic which was interrupted when the police raided Mafalani's apartment, which is heard in the recording.
The trial will continue on Wednesday, when the court will hear secret recordings of the arrest of Slobodan Djurovic, who is charged with acting as a middleman between the assassins and Sreten Jocic aka Joca, who under the indictment paid EUR 1.5 million to have Pukanic killed.
