Knin

Croatian political leaders, wartime generals and war veterans gathered on Friday in the town of Knin to mark the anniversary of the country's victorious military offensive, Operation Storm, which effectively ended the independence war in the country in 1995.

The man identified in court in The Hague as Witness 56 was a Serb policeman in the Croatian town of Knin between May 1994 and August 5, 1995. That was the date when he left the country, along with around 200,000 other Serbs, as the Croatian Army crushed Serb rebel forces during Operation Storm.

Croatia's political leadership, wartime generals and war veterans gathered on Thursday in the town of Knin to mark the anniversary of the victorious military offensive, Operation Storm, that practically ended the independence war in the country in 1995.

Part of the ceremony took place at the Knin Fortress, while another part was held at the town's football stadium.

Knin – Slovenian energy company Petrol has opened its second wind farm in Croatia. Ljubač, situated near the town of Knin in south Croatia, has nine turbines, which should generate around 96 gigawatts of electricity a year, covering the needs of 30,000 households.

"Milosevic's men on the ground" was the most common description of these two leading Serbian state security officials - Jovica Stanisic, chief of the interior ministry's State Security Service and his right-hand man, Franko 'Frenki' Simatovic, commander of the service's Special Operations Unit.

"A very, very dangerous man."

This is how the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, described the fugitive she hunted for more than a decade in order to bring him for trial for the first genocide on European soil since the defeat of Nazi Germany.

A protected witness told the retrial of Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague on Wednesday that the Serbian State Security Service (SDB) was not involved in the so-called 'Log Revolution' that saw Serbs rebel against the Croatian authorities in 1990.

Croatian Serb leaders condemned on Thursday two attacks by masked assailants on local Serbs watching a televised football match near the town of Knin.

The Serbs in the villages of Uzdolje and Djevrske were watching a game involving Red Star from the Serbian capital Belgrade when the attackers burst into the bars, media reports said. Five, including a minor, were lightly injured.

On August 5, Croatia marks its Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day and the Day of Croatian Defenders with an annual celebration in the southern town of Knin.

Former police chief Milenko Zelenbaba, a Serbian citizen, was charged with committing war crimes against Croat villagers near the southern town of Knin in 1992.