A Balkan war criminal who hid in Ireland for almost two decades has been jailed for seven years for abduction and torture following his extradition to Croatia last year.
Vojislav Buzaković was convicted in a Croatian court of abducting and torturing residents and prisoners of war in the town of Petrovci, near Vukovar during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.
He carried out the abuse while a member of the SAO Krajina militia, which was fighting for autonomy for Serbs living in Croatia.
Buzaković (58) emigrated to Ireland in 2005. Two years later, he was indicted in absentia by Croatian war crimes investigators for helping to illegally imprison and abuse civilians over six months between August 1991 and February 1992.
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However, authorities were unable to locate Buzaković to bring him to trial. He built a life here and set up a business before obtaining Irish citizenship.
In March 2021, the Garda signed up to the Schengen Information System (SIS), a sophisticated European Union-wide database of wanted suspects and missing people.
In early 2023, Buzaković's presence in Ireland was detected on the system along with the existence of an international warrant from the Croatian Ministry of Justice for his arrest.
Buzaković was arrested by gardaí and brought before the High Court in February 2023. After several hearings, he consented to his extradition in mid-March and was flown to Croatia 10 days later.
He was kept in pretrial detention until his conviction this month.
Osijek County Court found him guilty of acting with other militia members in interrogating and abusing four people, including by beating them with rifle butts and batons to the point of unconsciousness. The victims were non-Serbian residents of the local town.
Buzaković denied the war crime charges. He said he was mobilised during the war and assigned to protection duty in Petrovci. He told the court that he acted on a superior’s orders to bring villagers in for interrogation but denied engaging in physical or psychological torture.
In sentencing, the judge took into account Buzaković's young age at the time of the incidents.
The seven-year term was criticised by survivors as too lenient.
“He carried out systematic torture, which is against international law and a criminal act. For more than thirty years, the accused was inaccessible to the hand of justice,” a survivors group told Croatian media.
Buzaković's lawyer, Anto Nobilo, also criticised the guilty verdict which he called “shameful, too drastic and made without any evidence”. He said his client’s actions amounted to “a couple of slaps without any injuries”.
Mr Nobilo has appealed the verdict to a higher court.
One of Buzaković's co-accused, Milenko Đurđević, was previously located in Sweden and extradited to Croatia in 2020. He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2022.
Buzaković is not the first alleged war criminal sought by the Croatian authorities who was found living in Ireland. In 2014, Dorde Stojaković was arrested by gardaí in advance of his extradition to face trial over the inhumane treatment of Croatian prisoners of war in Serbia in 1991.
Stojaković, who was a member of the Yugoslav National Army, was accused of taking the soldiers off a bus and torturing them mentally and physically. Over a year, he fought his extradition to Croatia on the basis that it was not a sovereign state when the alleged offences occurred. The High Court disagreed and he was sent back in June 2015.
