Croatian army

Zagreb County Court on Monday convicted Dragan Birac of committing war crimes in Hrvatska Kostajnica in central Croatia in September 1991 after he was tried in absentia.

"Goodbye, #GeneralHRT. Monday will never be the same again," one Twitter user wrote on Monday evening after the last episode of the TV series 'The General' was aired on Croatian public television station HRT.

Romania and Croatia said on Tuesday that they have joined other NATO countries in withdrawing military personnel from Iraq following the Baghdad parliament's call for foreign troops to leave the country in reaction to the US killing of a top Iranian general near the Iraqi capital on January 4.

Human rights groups in Serbia and Croatia have called on authorities in both countries to do more to recognise and aid victims of a 1995 Croatian military operation that ended the country's war against rebel Serbs.

Croatia on Monday marked the 24th anniversary of Operation Storm, a military blitz that quashed a breakaway Serb statelet but put to flight almost 200,000 Serb civilians.

One Croatian soldier has died and two others have been injured after a suicide bomber slammed his motorcycle into a vehicle they were travelling in near a NATO military base on the outskirts of Kabul in Afghanistan, the Croatian Defence Ministry said on Wednesday.

Branimir Glavas, who has been a defendant in a series of trials for the killings of Serb civilians in Osijek for more than a decade, declared his innocence again on Monday as the latest proceedings against him opened at Zagreb County Court.

Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic told the ceremony at the Ministry of Defence building in Zagreb on Sunday that the MiG-21 fighter plane was one of the main symbols of Croatia's 1991-95 'Homeland War'.

Plenkovic said that its return after 28 years of quiet diplomacy and government efforts was a mark of honour for all Croatian veterans and their families.

Milorad Pupovac, the leader of the Independent Democratic Serb Party, SDSS, one of the parties representing Croatia's Serb minority, said on Friday that the defacement of some of the party's European Parliament election campaign billboards should not deter Croatian Serbs from turning out to vote.

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.

Croatian President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic's sudden changes of heart about a World War II salute used by the Ustasa movement reflect her desperate wish to please the international community, which has been criticising Croatia over historical revisionism, and a right-wing constituency that has supported her through four years of her presidency, experts say.