Stanimirovic said in the interview that hostilities in Vukovar in the early 1990s had not been initiated by Serbs, as claimed by Croatia, and that among the wounded who were taken from the Vukovar hospital to the nearby Ovcara farm and executed were soldiers disguised as patients.

The ministry on Monday strongly condemned Stanimirovic's statement as "an attempt at manipulating historical facts and deluding the public, both in Croatia and in Serbia." It also expressed regret that such a statement "casts a shadow on the efforts by the two countries to strengthen Croatian-Serbian relations and deal with numerous outstanding issues, notably the fate of missing persons."

The ministry said it was "appalled by the fact that a former member of the Croatian Parliament and leader of a political party registered in Croatia gives himself the right to undermine in that way the dignity of the Homeland War and Croatian veterans, including those of Serb ethnicity, who realised in time who was the victim and who the aggressor."

"It is frightening and highly immoral of Stanimirovic to criticise the Croatian soldiers whom the Serb aggressors, members of the Yugoslav People's Army and paramilitary forces, took away from the Vukovar hospital and brutally killed and who then tried to cover up all the tracks of that bestial crime, which has not been fully investigated and prosecuted even to this day. Among the victims killed at Ovcara were civilians and soldiers, children and the elderly, who were not only denied the right to be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention, but also the right to live, which was taken away from them in the cruellest way," the ministry said.