A court refused to grant early release to former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan, convicted of war crimes against Croatian civilians and prisoners of war in 1991.
Varazdin County Court on Wednesday rejected a request for the early release of former Serbian paramilitary commander Dragan Vasiljkovic, alias Captain Dragan.
Vasiljkovic’s lawyer Tomislav Filakovic applied for conditional release because the former paramilitary has served about 94 per cent of his war crimes sentence.
But the court said it turned the request down because Vasiljkovic remains unrepentant.
“The inmate denies committing the criminal offence and considers his sentence undeserved,” the court said in a statement released on Thursday.
His sentence is due to end on March 28, 2020.
Vasiljkovic was found guilty of committing his crimes at the fortress in Knin in June and July 1991, where imprisoned Croatian policemen and soldiers were abused, as well as during an attack on a police station in the town of Glina and surrounding villages in July 1991, which result in the killing of one civilian and a journalist.
In September last year, the county court in the Croatian coastal city of Split sentenced Vasijkovic to 15 years in prison.
But in July this year, Croatia’s Supreme Court reduced the sentence from 15 to 13-and-a-half years.
Vasiljkovic was extradited to Croatia in 2015 from Australia, where he had been working as a golf instructor under the name Daniel Snedden.
He had moved to Australia at the age of 14 but returned to Yugoslavia before the start of the 1990s conflicts and was then sent by the authorities in Belgrade to be the commander of a training centre for a Serb special paramilitary unit in Croatia in 1991.
