The deputy head of the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK), Slobodan Sasic, on Wednesday demanded the highest prison terms of 40 years for the accused on trial for the 2008 assassination of the co-owner of Nacional political magazine, Ivo Pukanic.
"The crimes committed were directed against freedom of the press and against democracy, and the purpose of punishment can only be achieved with the harshest sentence," Sasic said in his closing arguments at the end of the trial.
Although the person or persons who commissioned the assassination remained unidentified, Sasic said they were members of "the international tobacco mafia that can provide considerable funds to finance criminal organisations."
Sasic said the tobacco mafia had hired the group led by Sreten Jocic to kill Pukanic to stop him and Nacional from writing about tobacco smuggling.
First they tried to bribe him, and the decision on his assassination was made after Pukanic testified in Italian investigations targeting the tobacco mafia, he said.
"The institutions of this country should bear in mind that the human resources of this criminal organisation have not been exhausted with these accused," Sasic warned.
Pukanic was killed together with his business associate, Niko Franjic, by a remote-controlled bomb attached to a scooter parked by Pukanic's car outside the Nacional building in Zagreb on 23 October 2008. Franjic was a collateral victim.
