Action Demanded Over Threats to Croatian Journalists

The European Federation of Journalists, EFJ, said on Monday that it felt "deeply concerned by the increase of hate speech and direct threats towards journalists in Croatia while impunity remains rampant".

"An alert will be submitted to the platform of the Council of Europe for the protection of journalism and the safety of journalists," EFJ stated.

The EFJ also noted that it was joining its affiliate in the Croatian Journalists' Association, HND, in "calling on to the authorities to investigate and adequately respond to the incident" regarding the HND's president Sasa Lekovic.

Lekovic wrote on Facebook on Friday that someone half-sawed two screws on a wheel of his car, due to which he almost had an accident when driving on the highway from Belgrade to Zagreb on Thursday.

A mechanic "eventually informed me that he found that two screws on the right front wheel were sawed half-way and that after 300 kilometres of driving it caused the breaking up [of screws]," he wrote.

Lekovic wrote in the same post that this is not the first time somebody "played with the screws" on the wheels of his car but that he did not report earlier cases.

After the case was revealed on Friday, a number of NGOs and media representatives characterised it as an assassination attempt and called on the police to investigate.

HND's executive committee called the case "a culmination of the verbal assaults and worst insults" that Lekovic had received since becoming the HND president in 2014, while on certain web portals, it said, readers "openly call for his murder".

It warned that Lekovic's case showed that only "a small step" separates threats of physical violence and actual assassination attempts.

"We demand the most urgent actions of...