The Office for Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) launched a probe against those six Croatian citizens, aged between 31 and 58, and against a 37-year-old Serbian national for whose arrest a warrant has been issued.

Those six arrested Croatian are two police officers, a Croatian Interior Ministry employee, two staff members from the Croatian Consulate in the northeastern Bosnian city of Tuzla, and another individual

The mastermind in this passport forgery ring that supplied Balkan mobsters with Croatian travel documents is a 58-year-old man who has Croatian citizenship and lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The suspects used to steal the identity of Croatian nationals of Serb background living outside Croatia who had not yet applied for Croatian passports and their identity was used in the passports with photos of those passport holders, who were not eligible for Croatian passports but obtained those documents in that unlawful manner.

The passport forgery ring was busted in the police operation codenamed "Border".

So far, 53 counterfeit passports have been found in the police investigation, and 50 more are believed to have been distributed from 2006 to 2010. The alleged passport counterfeiters could "earn" more than a half million euros this way. The original Croatian passports with the stolen identity of other persons were sold at prices reportedly ranging between 10,000 and 50,000 euros.

In recent years, Croatian documents have been found on people suspected of international crime. The latest such case was reported in February when Serbian underworld figures Luka Bojovic, Vladimir Milisavljevic and Sinisa Petric were arrested in Spain with Croatian documents on them. Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic said then that he expected that it would be clarified soon how these and other Serbian mobsters had obtained Croatian passports.