Speaking on a Croatian television current affairs programme on Monday evening, Roncevic said that as soon as the first media reports had appeared he had requested a report on the case from the Military Security Agency. He recalled that military police officers had compiled official records already in 2000.
"It is not true that attempts were made to cover up the case. An investigation was carried and 14 persons, mainly conscripts doing their military service in Lora, were interviewed. None of them said they had been sexually harassed, abused or raped," Roncevic said.
According to Roncevic, conscripts said in their statements that already on arriving in Lora to do their military service they had heard stories of an officer with homosexual inclinations. "None of them, however, said that they had experienced anything embarrassing. One conscript spoke of certain actions that could be characterised as sexual harassment, but he said he did not want to press any charges and make a scandal out of it."
Roncevic said that the procedure had been fully observed and that "the military police investigators assessed that there were no grounds for pressing charges ex officio."
Jozo Rados, who served as defence minister in 2000, also rejected the possibility of rape, saying that a gross crime such as raping a conscript could not have happened without the minister's knowledge.
Asked by the programme's host what had happened to the officer with homosexual inclinations, Roncevic said he had been sent into retirement.
Asked if the officer who had reported the case had been contacted, Roncevic said that "Sergeant Bacic was contacted by military police investigators on August 31, 2000," when they took a statement from him. "Everything he said exists in the file, and the statement by the conscript cast doubt on the credibility of Bacic's statement," the defence minister said.
Roncevic added that "the investigating officers had reason to doubt the credibility of Sergeant Bacic's statement, because the conscript said twice -- both in his statement to the military police investigators and to the Interior Ministry investigators -- that Sergeant Bacic had called him and suggested to him that he should say that the officer had touched his intimate parts."
Rados said that it was not "a covered-up rape case" as had been portrayed by the media from the start. "The Office of the Public Prosecutor should respond ex officio, because this must not go unclarified. It is in the interests of the parents, the officers and all those concerned," he added.
Tonci Majic of the Dalmatian Human Rights Committee said there was a tape showing conscripts being sexually harassed, and Roncevic reminded him that it was his duty to send any physical evidence to the Public Prosecutor's Office.
Since Majic said that in the past few days he had been contacted by several parents who expressed their concern about their sons doing their military service in Lora, Roncevic appealed to all parents and conscripts to address their concerns to the Defence Ministry using a special telephone line.