“It is indisputable that six elderly people were killed in the village of Grubori and that these killings were committed by members of the Lucko anti-terrorist unit, but everything else is disputable.”
With these words, Zagreb county court judge Zdravko Majerovic last weekacquitted two former members of Croatia’s Lucko special police unit, Franjo Drljo and Bozo Krajina of what he called a “brutal crime” that “disgraced the Croatian state”.
The trial for the killings in Grubori which happened after the Croatian military’s Operation Storm in August 1995, which seized back the area around Knin — which had been the centre of the Croatian Serb rebellion in 1991 – took two and a half years.
The elderly Serbs were killed during a “cleansing of the terrain” on August 25, 1995, one day before a ‘Freedom Train’ carrying President Franjo Tudjman and the entire national leadership was to celebrate victory in the war by passing through the ‘liberated area’ on the Zagreb-Split railroad.
Members of the Lucko anti-terrorist unit, an elite Croatian police cell, had the task of searching the area and securing the route. On the first day of two-day “cleansing action”, five people were killed in Grubori , including an 80-year-old man and a 90-year-old woman. Another person was killed later.
First in the group of police officers who entered Grubori was Franjo Drljo. He was charged with directly committing crimes against six civilians, and not doing anything to prevent his subordinates from killing civilians and burning their homes. Bozo Krajina was charged with command responsibility.