Last summer, they smuggled 54 groups of migrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina through Croatia to Slovenia.
The Office for Suppressing Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) has indicted five persons for smuggling illegal migrants through Croatia. Marko Babić (31), Daniel Mikšić (29), Nikola Babić (21), Mladen Šprajcar (56) and Vladimir Štitić (51) have been indicted and will remain in prison during the rest of the proceedings, with the exception of Šprajcar, reports Večernji List on March 3, 2018.
According to the indictment, Marko Babić was the brain of the operation, and he organised the other members of the group to smuggle people through Croatia. They are charged that, from 5 June to 10 August 2017, they smuggled 54 groups of people from Bosnia and Herzegovina through Croatia to Slovenia. The groups included 469 foreigners. At the same time, they took from migrants 71,950 euro and 6,400 kuna, and then shared the money among themselves.
Marko Babić and Štitić are well-known to the law enforcement authorities. Between 2005 to 2013, Babić was convicted nine times in Croatian courts for various criminal offences. He was convicted of assaulting an official, preventing an official from performing their duties, serious theft, fraud, forgery… He was given a series of sentences, including one of two years and eight months in prison.
Štitić, who is a former military police officer, also has an extensive criminal record and was also convicted nine times. His convictions are mostly related to drugs, but he was also convicted of threats, forgery of documents, serious theft… He received his first conviction in 1993 when he was sentenced in Stuttgart in Germany to two years and eight months in prison for drugs.
He was first mentioned in Croatian crime reports in 1995 when the police stopped a car he was driving. In it, 32 kilograms of heroin were found, but Štitić escaped and was on the run until 2001 when he was arrested in Zagreb after an anonymous tip. At the time, he had with him counterfeited personal documents, and he showed to the police officers a refugee card indicating that he was Siniša Budisavljević from Vojnić. The document was issued in Montenegro in 1994. Due to the heroin found in 1995, he was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison. Before embarking on the crime spree, he participated in the Homeland War and has received several military decorations.
Translated from Večernji List (reported by Ivana Jakelić).
