"We have pressed the charges because we believe that somebody has changed the original transcripts, and for that we have evidence that we will submit to the prosecution," one of Gotovina's attorneys, Ivo Farcic, told Hina on Wednesday. He explained that the evidence was based on statements by several participants in the meeting, which was held on the northern Adriatic island of Brijuni, who have suspicions about the authenticity of the transcripts, parts of which were published by some media.
Gotovina's attorneys doubt that the transcripts are authentic also because the list of participants in the Brijuni meeting does not include some military officials who attended it. They therefore request the prosecution to interview the participants and establish if the transcripts were forged and by whom.
Farcic said he did not know if the transcripts had been declassified as announced recently. He recalled that Gotovina's attorneys had been requesting access to those documents since June this year and that they believed that they were the basis of Gotovina's indictment and the prosecution's allegation about the criminal enterprise aimed at forcing Serb civilians out of the so-called Krajina region.
The media have reported that the UN war crimes tribunal has been in possession of the Brijuni documents since 2000 and that they were introduced as evidence in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in the autumn of 2002.
Prime Minister Ivo Sanader recently said that one should investigate how the transcripts had ended up in The Hague.
President Stjepan Mesic recently said that the documents were found in the President's Office and that he would declassify them. Yesterday he said that he had consented to make the documents available, but that it was now up to the government to deal with the case.
There has been no official confirmation about the declassifying of the documents and so far it has not been possible to check if the document discovered in the President's Office was the transcript which reportedly has been in possession of the Hague tribunal for four years, and whether the published segments are authentic.