Murder of the Zec family

The murder of the Zec family occurred in Zagreb, Croatia on 7 December 1991, during the Croatian War of Independence, when a squad of five Croatian militiamen shot dead three members of a Serbian family: Mihajlo Zec, his wife Marija and their 12-year-old daughter, Aleksandra. The murderers were apprehended, but released after a controversial court decision in 1992. After a long period of apparent negligence and cover-up, the Zec family murder was never addressed by the Croatian legal system, but the government agreed to compensate the surviving family members in a 2004 court settlement. The main perpetrators of this murder were given prison sentences on separate crimes.

At around 11:00 p.m. on 7 December 1991, the Zec family home near Zagreb, was surrounded by five people: Siniša Rimac, Munib Suljić, Igor Mikola, Nebojša Hodak and Snježana Živanović. They invaded the premises purportedly to arrest Mihajlo Zec, a butcher by profession, due to alleged links to rebel Krajina Serbs. Four of the men were members of Tomislav Merčep's paramilitary unit, reserve units of the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs. In a later leak of President Tuđman's transcripts, Merčep was quoted in 1995 as telling Tuđman the murder was ordered by Zvonimir Trusić, who in turn was, according to Merčep, a subordinate of then Minister of Foreign Affairs Zvonimir Šeparović and then-Minister of the Interior Ivan Vekić. This testimony was never investigated by a court.

Mihajlo Zec ran out on the street, and tried to escape, but Siniša Rimac shot him from a distance of thirty meters. After that, they tied up his wife, Marija, and one of their daughters, Aleksandra, threw them into a van with no license plates and drove to a mountain lodge near Medvednica mountain. Once on Sljeme, Aleksandra and Marija were killed and dumped into a pit of garbage. Aleksandra's siblings, Gordana and Dušan, managed to successfully hide and fled to their grandmother's home in Banja Luka. Subsequent investigations purport that Rimac allegedly did not want Aleksandra to be killed, but the others opposed any mercy as she was a witness. The girl was shot in the head with an automatic Heckler & Koch rifle, by Munib Suljić.

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