The student, whom the media identified as 21-year-old student Ivan Kesic, sent the e-mail around 10.45 hours on June 1. According to Vecernji List daily, which first reported about the threatening e-mail, the youth informed the Jewish Municipality Zagreb that if he won a reward for the best cartoon about the Holocaust, which was offered by Iran, he would donate the money to Hamas. He also said he wished "the Iranians to complete a nuclear bomb as soon as possible and launch it on Haifa and Tel Aviv," after which celebrations would be held in Zagreb's streets.
After the threat was reported and the media wrote about the case, the police found the student and searched his apartment. The police said they found a computer and the e-mail in question as well as "material of similar content".
"The entire case if the result of injudicious actions by an individual who wants to draw attention to himself," said Zagreb Police operations analyst Davor Tor.
Jewish Municipality Zagreb officials made similar statements yesterday. Kesic himself told the press he was not a racist and that pictures of dead Palestinian children had induced him to send the threatening e-mail.
The media revealed, however, that in the past he uploaded to the Internet a series of similar messages glorifying Nazism and belittling Jews and their plight in the Holocaust. According to Vecernji List, he signed some of those messages with his full name and the nickname Genuine Croatian Right Winger.
Public statements about one race's supremacy over another, the dissemination or encouragement to racial discrimination, which Kesic has been charged with, entail a prison term ranging from three months to three years.