Croatia Charges Ex-Fighter with Wartime Rape near Vukovar

Police announced on Monday that they have charged a 55-year-old Croatian citizen, who they did not name, with committing a war crime against a civilian.

According to the police, "a criminal investigation established a well-founded suspicion" that the suspect, who was "an armed member of paramilitary units", raped a female Croatian citizen.

The crime happened at the end of October 1991, in a settlement near the eastern town of Vukovar, when it was besieged by the Yugoslav People's Army and Serb paramilitaries.

The suspect, who was aged 26 at the time, "took advantage of the circumstances of the war and the temporary occupation of the settlement" to take a woman from the agricultural field where she was working to the local community centre for interrogation. After that, "he raped her several times during the evening", police said.

The suspect is currently unavailable to the authorities, the police statement added.

Vukovar was besieged from late August 1991. The defenders of the town surrendered on November 18, after which all the non-Serb population was expelled, and a number of prisoners of war and civilians were deported to prisons and detention camps in Serbia, while more than 200 people were executed at the nearby Ovcara Farm and in other places.

Over 3,000 soldiers and civilians died during the siege of Vukovar and its aftermath, 86 of them children. After being under the control of rebel Croatian Serbs for four years, the town was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in 1998.