Montenegrin and Serbian mobsters paid from 3.500 to 15.000 euros for Croatian travel documents that allowed them to move freely, despite warrants.
The new identities were provided by members of two criminal groups from Croatia, whose members were arrested last week in that country, in the "Passport" operation, Jutarnji.hr announced.
Among the arrested members of those two criminal organizations are also officers of the Croatian police, whose task was to find Croats by birth who, most of the time, due to dual citizenship, have so far not produced the documents of that country.
After determining that someone was of age, they searched to see if he was clean before the law, and then they issued original documents with his identity and a photo of the criminal who paid for the service, reports Jutarnji.hr.
He states that thanks to the arrested members of criminal groups, Gligorije Peljević, a member of an international group of cocaine smugglers who smuggled 2015 tons of cocaine in 2,4, had a Croatian passport in the name of Dušan Stjepanović.
Srđan Jezdimir, also a cocaine smuggler, was arrested with a passport in the name of Milenko Šeatović.
Croatian documents were also used by the two alleged leaders of the Skaljar criminal clan, Jovan Vukotić and Igor Dedović, who were given the identities of Đorđe Radojčić and Dragan Popović, respectively.
The Croatian police established that a member of that clan, Jovan Jovanović, had a passport in the name of Nenad Kleuta. Allegedly, a close associate of Jovan Vukotić, Dragan Pečurica, used a Croatian passport that contained the information of Saša Budimir, and Krsto Vujić, a resident of Novlja, paid for the documents in the name of Gordan Kelebuda.
Damir Meljović from Kavča, arrested last May in Paris with 69 kilograms of cocaine, had several false identities, among them a Croatian passport in the name of Dejan Poštić. A member of that clan, Miloš Radonjić, also had a Croatian passport, as well as Srđan Stojanović from Novi Sad - Srki, who was tried for murder in Prague. He was granted a passport in the name of Vlado Milinović.
Benedikt Pindrić aka Beco, arrested for heroin smuggling, had a passport in the name of Darko Maljković, and the Slovenian Klemen Kadivec in the name of Marko Agbaba.
Groups of counterfeiters were discovered by Croatian police investigators who secretly monitored them for months in cooperation with USKOK. During the investigation, they established that they issued fake Croatian identity cards, passports and driver's licenses mainly to members of the Serbian and Montenegrin underground and thus earned around half a million euros.
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