Crime zone Croatia

Lars at Krimi-Couch adds the name of Jurica Pavicic to the list of Croatian crime writers. A quick and dirty search turns up this on Pavicic:

On December 7th 1991 home of Mihajlo Zec, well-to-do Zagreb butcher and ethnic Serb, was visited by a group of reserve policeman. In those days such visits usually ended with people being taken away only to be found executed. Zec apparently tried to escape and was killed. His wife Marija and 12-year old daughter Aleksandra were taken in a police vehicle and later executed. The perpetrators were relatively quickly arrested and admitted the killings during interrogation. But due to procedural screw-up their confessions were invalid and whole criminal case was dropped. Instead of receiving prison sentences, the killers later received military decorations and pensions. The killings later served as inspiration for Ovce od gipsa, novel by Jurica Pavicic, later adapted into controversial movie Svjedoci.

This has overtones of Dario Fo's play Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and it suggests once again that I was too hasty to assume that no Croatian crime writers had written about life in their own war zone of the 1990s.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jurica Pavičić