"I am confident the police will do everything necessary. Faber is a highly professional police officer, he is not linked to any political option and his team will do the job so that the perpetrators are punished and the innocent ones freed," Mesic said in a Croatian Television broadcast on Tuesday evening when asked if he expected the murders to be solved after 15 years.
Asked if he had known about the killing of Serb civilians in Osijek in 1991, when he was prime minister, Mesic said he had not. He recalled having warned the then President Franjo Tudjman about the unlawful replacement of managers of Osijek companies.
"At one of the meetings at which that issue was discussed, the President's advisor on security Tomislav Sutalo said that the rule of law ceased to exist on the borders of Osijek County and that somebody else ruled there," Mesic said.
Asked whether the latest events were a rigged political trial as claimed by some, Mesic did not answer, but only repeated that until 2000 Croatia had not functioned as a law-based state.
He also said that the incumbent government was continuing in the steps of the former government and that it was determined to put an end to the selective application of laws and to "process also those cases which are believed to have happened, but which have not been fully investigated".