Sanader said that he and the head of state were jointly taking care of the activities of the security services to ensure that they operated in accordance with EU and NATO standards and carried out their task of protecting national security.
"It is also our task to protect those services against unfounded attacks, and in this case it turned out that the charges levelled by the persons who are very prominent in political life were not founded and that they were not the subject of any checks or surveillance," the prime minister said.
Mesic said that the SOA had not violated the law. "The persons that were mentioned were not the subject of intelligence investigations and the law was not broken, so in that regard we can be happy," he said.
Asked if the three MPs had been followed around by "the intelligence underworld", Mesic said that the parliamentary Committee on Home Affairs and National Security would submit a full report on the case, and when asked how it came about that the report appeared in the media before he and Sanader received it, the president said: "I don't know. I only got it today, just as the prime minister did."
Sanader said that next week the government would update the Regulation on Security Checks because it was not harmonised with the Security Services Act. He added that he expected a new law to be in place within the next month or two.
Commenting on the case of a background check of Sandra Bencic, a member of the Council for the Development of Civil Society, Sanader said it had been found that the former head of the government's Office for Nongovernmental Organisations, Jadranka Cigelj, had the legal right to request background checks for the Council members, but that "politically it was absolutely unacceptable."
"Cigelj made a mistake for not requesting written consent from the Council members who were being vetted, and in terms of procedural and political responsibility, as far as we are concerned the matter was resolved with her dismissal," the prime minister said.