In the article headlined "Arrest in Croatia Murder Doesn"t Erase All Doubt", author Dan Bilefsky writes that "six months have passed since Ivana Hodak, a glamorous young lawyer who was part of her country"s "Golden Generation," was shot and killed in the stairwell of her family home, leaving a nagging mystery of whether she was truly slain by a homeless drifter or by a hired killer."
The article reads that though there is no evidence linking the Ivana Hodak murder and the murder of Ivo Pukanic, editor and the co-owner of the magazine Nacional, which was perpetrated also in downtown Zagreb two weeks after the girl's killing, those killings have been "connected in the public consciousness".
"The fatal attacks have generated alarm in the European Union, heightening concerns that lawlessness dating to the Balkan wars of the 1990s has erupted in Croatia," the newspaper says recalling that Croatia joined NATO this month and is next in line to join the EU.
The article recalls that In the Ivana Hodak case, the police apprehended a former tennis academy janitor, Mladen Slogar, in February and said he confessed that he killed her because he bore a grudge against her father, Zvonimir Hodak which the magazine describes as "a powerful lawyer".
"I just don"t buy it," Zvonimir Hodak, "who has defended some of Croatia"s most notorious gangsters and war crimes suspects" was quoted as saying in a an interview.
"To me, it looks like a professional killing rather than an amateur. This case has been overshadowed by petty lies. Why would someone want to kill Ivana? Why not kill me instead?," the victim's father said.
In this context the newspaper reports that Hodak said he believed that his daughter"s killing was linked to the arrest and the trial of one of his clients, a former Croatian general, Vladimir Zagorec, who in March was sentenced to seven years in prison for embezzling USD 5 million worth of gems while he was stepping out of office as Assistant Defence Minister several years ago.
The newspaper reported that "in reaction to the killings in October, the government almost immediately dismissed the chiefs of the police and the judiciary. It also created an office to fight organized crime, which resulted in the arrests of a number of suspects in a mafia crackdown."