Speaking at a news conference after meeting the chief prosecutor of the Hague war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, PM Sanader said that Chief State Prosecutor Mladen Bajic had informed him and the ICTY that the so-called Brijuni transcripts were authentic and that "General Gotovina cannot build his defence on the assumption that the transcripts are a forgery".
Those who used the allegation that the transcripts were forged to build Gotovina's defence and oppose the tribunal have to face the fact that the transcripts are authentic, Sanader said, alluding to Gotovina's defence team.
"Contrary to what PM Ivo Sanader claims, the audio recordings that were recently found in the archives of President Tujdman's office show that the transcript of the (Brijuni) meeting held on July 31, 1995, is indeed a forgery," the attorneys said in a statement.
They went on to say that the Zagreb Municipal Prosecutor's Office, which on May 2 confirmed the authenticity of the transcript, issued a decision refusing a lawsuit they had filed against "an unidentified forger" which read that the transcript did not match the audio recording because some words had been left out from the transcript or had been incorrectly stated and that some participants in the Brijuni meeting had been incorrectly identified.
The attorneys said they believed that the Chief State Prosecutor's Office had confirmed the authenticity of the Brijuni transcripts due to political pressure from The Hague, which they said was evidenced by a statement Del Ponte's political advisor and spokesman Jean-Daniel Ruch gave on May 4, when he said that the Hague prosecutors had been convinced from the start that the transcripts were authentic and requested the Croatian government to confirm their authenticity.
At a press briefing on May 4, Ruch confirmed that the ICTY prosecution had sent its copy of the transcripts to the authorities in Zagreb to compare them with the discovered audio-recording.
He added that the prosecutors had never doubted that the transcripts were authentic and that they had used them in court in different situations.
Concluding their statement, Gotovina's defence team, led by Luka Misetic, urged Croatian authorities to publish the audio-recording in the media and let the public decide if the Brijuni transcripts were authentic.