Justice needed almost four and a half years to catch up with Anton Gudelj, the man who murdered Josip Reihl-Kir, a head of the Osijek Police Department (PD), Goran Zobundzija, vice president of the local government, and Milan Knezevic, a local government representative in Osijek at the time. During all that time, Gudelj has been known, both at home and abroad, as the Kir's murderer, since all facts indicate that Kir was Gudelj's target and that the others perished because they unfortunately happened to be close to Kir. In Osijek, however, the authorities have commemorated the third anniversary of the murder as the murder of Zobundzija, on whose grave they had laid a wreath.
Due to the exceptional support of the president of the local government in Osijek, Branimir Glavas, although the initiative for changes of the street names in the city had already been concluded, a township has been named after Zobundzija; the township used to bear the name of Prokopije Uzelac, a great Osijek benefactor and a physician who had saved thousands of lives of his fellow citizens. Although the inhabitants of the township were unhappy because of such removal of a memory of a man who had obliged the city, this didn't affect Glavas, since Prokopije was, after all, only Prokopije [a Serb], and not, for example, Branimir.
Glavas has later demonstrated, on several occasions, how much he cared about the name; speaking about his future heirs, he said that they can do whatever they like as long as they didn't change the name of the township of Goran Zobundzija. To our journalist's question, about why a street in Osijek hasn't been named after Kir as well, Glavas replied that Kir was originally from Dakovo, so that they should name a street after him. Dakovo is today a part of Glavas' zupanija [the largest territorial unit in Croatia], but his team, although prone to parading, has never laid a wreath on Kir's grave, nor has anything been named after him in Dakovo.
How did you receive the news about the arrest of Anton Gudelj at the airport in Frankfurt [in Germany]?
I was rather disturbed, because the moment I've been waiting for all this years has finally come. I've forced myself to quit smoking, eat only healthy food and drink fruit juices, just to live long enough to see the justice done. Gudelj is not that interesting in this case. I don't expect a lot from him. But there is always a hope that his conscience will wake up, if he has it, and that he will say something new about the case during the trial. It won't be easy to face him, but that's what the sedatives are for.
When Tubic's wife saw him, she said that she couldn't have recognized him. Later, he was treated at the Military Clinical Center in Belgrade, but his kidneys were permanently damaged during that beating so he has to go to a dialysis twice a day.
I am disappointed! I haven't even received invitations to all hearings and the judge Ruzica Samota refused to summon several witnesses who might have been able to throw more light on the events. I was especially disappointed by the attitude of Josip's former policemen who appeared as witnesses. First, they all looked as their chief was murdered and none of them reacted, tried to prevent the murder or catch the murderer. He [the murderer] was undisturbed while he reloaded his rifle and walked away to a village. None of them was reprimanded after that. They were very rude at the trial, as if they were forced to appear. One of them was in a hurry, so he came in in the middle of a hearing and demanded to give a statement, without any respect, as if the trial didn't have to do anything with his chief. Commander of the road block [at which the murder occurred] "was on a coffee break" and didn't see what was going on; when he was summoned back he checked Josip's pulse and, he said, couldn't believe it. Who were they guarding there after all? So much negligence and no one was punished...
Why do you think that Gudelj only fired the shots, and that someone else "aimed for him"?
If the whole thing wasn't set up and planned in advance, how could it happen that the murdered simply strolled away, took care of his family and left the village in the presence of so many policemen? How could he have hidden afterwards for three days at his brother's place in Osijek, then traveled to Zagreb and finally left Croatia without any problems? I want that cleared up and that is the justice I am waiting for and which is my goal.
Your late husband...
Please, don't say that in front of me. He is still alive for me and I consider myself to be a married woman.
I am Sorry. Your husband, had been saying for weeks before his last mission that he was in danger of being assassinated; he told that to minister [of Internal Affairs], Josip Boljkovac. What was the source of danger, according to him?
I don't want to accuse anyone before the facts are established at the trial. But it is a fact that Josip had a lot of problems with armed HDZ [ruling nationalist party in Croatia] members; because of them he was unable to disarm Serb villages in the surrounding area. They [Serbs] promised to disarm as soon as police disarmed HDZ members. Unfortunately this chance for peace wasn't taken advantage of; instead Josip became a target of suspicions because Serbs trusted him. And why shouldn't they trust him when he always went to negotiations alone with his driver Miljenko and he always unbuttoned his jacket to show that he was unarmed. Even Serbian papers reported about this; they found this unbelievable. On one occasion, Josip told Miljenko that he wasn't sure if they would come back alive; Miljenko asked him to sign his retirement certificate, because he didn't want to drive anyone after Josip. And those negotiations were almost always successful and the peace held; unfortunately whatever Josip would build during the day, others would destroy during the following night, by attacking [Serb] village guards. Now those others, who were never peacemakers, would like to continue where Josip stopped.
He wanted to help solve the problems around Tenja [a village near Osijek]. I hardly saw him those days. On Wednesday, he placed police protection around our house, since he was concerned for our safety. He even switched official cars on the way home, in order to confuse potential assassins. Since Wednesday, until Monday, when the murder happened I saw him only once, on Sunday morning, asleep in the living room. Immediately, a phone rang and he had to go to negotiate in Bijelo Brdo. He said that he would resolve that quickly and come back. He resolved the problem but he didn't come back. He phoned me for the last time on Monday, July 1, in the morning and told me not to worry, because, "starting today everything will be different." He was probably thinking that we would finally leave for Zagreb, where he was supposed to start working as a head of a police academy; but the events were completely different. Indeed, since that day everything has been different. He didn't even tell me about Zagreb. He only said that to Barbara, our daughter, because he knew that it would be hard for me to leave Dakovo.
Mr. Glavas places responsibility on former Minister Boljkovac, because he didn't give a public statement about the threats and start an investigation against those whom Kir had pointed out.
Until that [the murder] happened, there was no evidence that an assassination was being prepared. Immediately afterwards, the following day, Boljkovac was dismissed and couldn't do anything.
As a man who fought for peace with all his strength, Josip was especially shaken when on one occasion Glavas, Vukojevic and Susak [Croatian Minister of Defense] came to him and demanded that he drive them to the entrance to Borovo Selo; they wanted to see the barricades. There, they saw a tractor trailer placed in the middle of the road; they stopped the car, and then the three of them came out of the car, took armbrusts [hand held rocket launcher] out of the trunk and fired three grenades. One grenade hit the barricade, the second one a house and the third one fell in a field. Myself and Mr. Boljkovac told about that event in front of the BBC cameras for the documentary "The Death of Yugoslavia", which has been aired around the world. You can draw your own conclusion about how this might have affected Josip's standing with all those people who wanted peace.
Gudelj's attorney, Nediljko Resetar, said that he would base his defense on the fact that his client didn't know that Kir and Zobundzija were also in the car. Do you think that he might succeed with this approach?
Mr. Resetar at first wanted to prove that Gudelj was mentally incompetent at that moment, but that didn't work. Now, supposedly, he didn't know who was in the car?! And only a few minutes earlier, the four of them passed in that car towards Osijek, and stopped at that road block and talked to Gudelj... There was no other traffic on that road, neither at the time of the murder or later.
You keep his things on several locations in the house...
When they sent his personal belongings, that was a great shock for me. Namely, the things arrived in a plastic bag and everything was bloody. A watch that I had given him, his check book, wallet, key chain, all bloody. They told me that they hadn't wanted to touch his things and that's why they hadn't washed them.