TUDJMAN DOES NOT INTERFERE WITH WORK OF COURT- VINKOVIC

ZAGREB, Feb 3 (Hina) - Croatian President Franjo Tudjman did not mention the case of Nada and Dinko Sakic in his report on the state of the nation to the Croatian Parliament ('Sabor'), neither did he in any way interfere with the work of the court that is conducting this case, Tudjman's public relations secretary, Tihomir Vinkovic, told Hina on Wednesday. Asked by Hina to comment on claims by Reuters that the release of Nada Sakic had a political dimension in connection with Tudjman's address to Sabor, Vinkovic said he was indignant at the extremely unprofessional, fabricated and incorrect "quotation" from the President's annual state of the nation address to Sabor. It is clear to everybody who heard the President's speech that President Tudjman made no mention of the Sakic case, Vinkovic said. On Tuesday, the British news agency reported that the Jewish and Serb activists accused Croatian authorities of having released Nada Sakic by a political decision. In its report, Reuters said that "in his annual state of the nation address President Tudjman spoke of the cases against Sakic and her husband as the West's 'renewed manipulation of NDH crimes', dismissing them as political pressure on Croatia." Nada Sakic, 72, charged with committing, in the Stara Gradiska concentration camp, a crime against humanity and international law - war crime against the civilian population - was released from the Zagreb County prison on Monday, after the State Attorney's Office in Zagreb County announced that it terminated her persecution, given that the pre-trial investigation did not confirm suspicions that she was guilty of the above-mentioned criminal offences. The director of Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), Efraim Zuroff told Reuters that he believed that there was "a political dimension" to the case of Nada Sakic. "If the president of a country says a thing like that, it's obvious that there is no political will to go forward," Zuroff was quoted by the Reuters as saying while commenting on Tudjman's address to Sabor in January. Vinkovic said that it was significant that Zuroff based his comment on that fabricated and false "quotation" from Tudjman's speech. He denied that President Tudjman had interfered with the work of the court which was dealing with the Sakic case. It is a malevolent and biased statement that President has interfered with the work of the court in any way, Vinkovic stressed. Submitting the state of the nation address to Sabor in January, President Tudjman said the relation of certain international factors towards Croatia had been "also distinguished by certain unfounded and even disproportionate pressures." "Their manifestations include attempts to engineer and impose electoral results in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the renewed manipulation of NDH (Independent State of Croatia) crimes, the political instrumentalisation of the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, the unreasonable reiteration of demands concerning democratic and media freedoms, or insistence on the priority importance of the Agreement of Ploce - up to the recent creation of an incident situation along part of the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina," Tudjman said in his speech. (hina) jn ms