Croatian police

The Croatian Foreign Ministry on Thursday delivered a protest note to Italy over the erection in Trieste of a monument to Gabriele D'Annunzio, the Italian poet widely perceived as a forerunner of Italian Fascism.

The Fresh Island festival was evacuated after the blaze erupted on Zrce beach, on the Croatian island of Pag, at around 1am on Tuesday.

The fire broke out just behind the Calypso club, the oldest club on Zrce beach, but firefighters' intervention early on Tuesday morning ensured that the club did not burn down and was not damaged.

Croatian police regularly prevent migrants from crossing the country's border, sometimes using violence, rights groups say. That has created a bottleneck in Bosnia.

Though the numbers are not on the scale of 2015, when the migrant crisis was at its height, Bosnia, and particularly its northwestern Una-Sana Canton, has struggled to cope.

Between May 2017 and May last year, NNK recorded 215 reported cases of push-backs by Croatian police to Serbia, of which 45 per cent involved physical violence.

Between May 2017 and December last year, there were 141 push-backs from Croatia to Bosnia, NNK reported, of which 84 per cent involved violence.

Zagreb County Court on Tuesday handed down a first-instance verdict convicting former Bosnian Serb Army officer Dane Lukajic of physically abusing prisoners at the Manjaca camp during wartime, and sentenced him to six years in prison, local media reported.

The verdict was made public on Thursday after the prosecution and defence issued their closing statements on Monday.

The Croatian Interior Ministry said on Wednesday that a Dutch citizen who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia for war crimes in 1991 has been extradited to Zagreb.

The ministry only gave his initials and year of birth, but local media reported that the man was 53-year-old Milorad Barac.

Undeterred by the freezing weather, migrants and refugees are still attempting to cross over from Bosnia and Herzegovina to EU-member Croatia.

The Higher Court in Podgorica on Tuesday sentenced investigative journalist Jovo Martinovic to one and a half years in prison for alleged drug trafficking and membership in a criminal organisation.

Martinovic told BIRN that the verdict was politically motivated and not based on facts.

Border Violence Monitoring, BVM, a watchdog organization in Croatia, on Sunday published video material of police expelling migrants and refugees across the Croatia-Bosnia border.

It said it received an anonymous message on 20 November, containing the video footage from the area.

The video shows a white van and a man standing in front of the vehicle waiting. Soon, some 20 migrants walk out of a forest and quickly enter the van.