HHO CONDEMNS DEATH THREATS MADE AGAINST REPORTER APPELT

ZAGREB, July 20 (Hina) - The Croatian Helsinki Committee (HHO) on Tuesday severely condemned death threats made against a journalist Hrvoje Appelt, after he published an article in the "Jutarnji List" daily on July 3 on the situation in the prison in Lepoglava. In the report headlined "Four Inmates and Rats in a Six-Square- Metre Cell" Appelt quoted several prisoners complaining about bad food, unhygienic conditions, systematic mental and physical harassment and beating of inmates. After that the press said unknown persons threatened to kill the journalist of the Jutarnji List. The Croatian Helsinki Committee maintained that Appelt's article is "just a part of the coarse mosaic about disorder in the Croatian penal system, i.e. in the Justice Ministry and its department for conducting sanctions." Statements in Appelt's report, which he had written after visiting the prison, seem, for the Committee, to be credible and similar to results of the research which the Committee had conducted in the Croatian penal system in 1998. The Committee stressed that hunger strikes, suicidal behaviour, torture and abuse of prisoners, about which Appelt wrote, were "a part of the everyday life of the Croatian prisons." (hina) ms