Talking via video link, Croatian Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko and his Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic said this form of communication was a concrete step towards the establishment of a regional centre for fighting organised crime, with Karamarko saying "the fight against organised crime is concrete, too, and now we are slowly going one step ahead of organised crime".

Dacic agreed, saying the new level of communication between the Croatian and Serbian police forces would provide for faster and better joint action in suppressing organised crime.

Responding to questions from the press, Dacic said his claim that the emphasis of an investigation into Hypo bank's illegal operations was on Croatia was based on his recent talks with Austrian police officials.

He said they told him that some key witnesses in the case were from Croatia and that the focus of their investigation in southeast Europe was Croatia. He added they also told him that the Hypo bank investigation was their biggest one to date and that the documentation collected so far "weighed" more than 20 million pages.

Dacic said the Serbian Interior Ministry was mainly interested in the operations of Hypo's Belgrade branch and that so far there was no information that would link Darko Saric, an alleged Montenegrin drug lord, to the bank. He added, however, that this did not mean that a connection would not be found out during the investigation.

Croatian police director Oliver Grbic said the investigation into the Hypo bank in Croatia began several months ago and that it focused on whether Croatia had served as a transition country for money-laundering.

Grbic said the police were not interested in transactions referring to the bank's high-risk operations or poor business results, but only if money had been transferred from Croatia to other countries. He added that four Croatian businesses were being investigated in this respect.

Serbian reporters asked about the Croatian public's position on the increasingly strong cooperation between the two countries' police forces, to which Karamarko responded that Croatians felt the police cooperation between the two countries meant higher security for them.

Grbic announced the possible completion in three weeks' time of an investigation of who had procured Croatian identity documents for members of the Zemun mob clan and who helped them hide in Croatia.

Dacic said the Serbian police would investigate all claims about gangland murders mentioned to Croatian investigators by Sretko Kalinic, a Zemun clan member whom Croatia recently extradited to Serbia.