Daily says part of missing file on Milijan Brkic and elite prostitution found

NEWS 19.03.201913:30
Marko Prpic/PIXSELL (ilustracija)

A part of a missing file on information leaks from a police investigation into elite prostitution, whose disappearance caused trouble five months ago, has been accidentally discovered in the archive of the Zagreb Municipal Prosecutor's Office, the Jutarnji List daily reported on Tuesday.

The file seems to have been lost at the time when the prosecutor’s office moved from a building in Zagreb’s Vukovarska Street, where it had been for years, to a new building in Selska Street in July 2017.

The part of the file, for which it was speculated that it was possibly stolen to prevent implicating HDZ party secretary-general Milijan Brkic in the affair, has reportedly been found in one of the boxes with archived files and prosecutors have confirmed its discovery to Jutarnji List.

“We could not, however, obtain information on which missing section of the file has been found. After the discovery, Chief State Prosecutor Drazen Jelinic ordered a thorough search of the entire archive to find the remainder of the file,” the daily says.

It recalls that the affair started in October 2018 when the Nacional weekly ran parts of police correspondence from 2011 in which the then chief of the PNUSKOK anti-corruption office in Rijeka, Bozo Barbaric, whose department was investigating an elite prostitution ring, told national criminal police chief Vitomir Bijelic that the police interviews conducted indicated that persons under police surveillance had been tipped off by Brkic.

“The police interviews have revealed that deputy national police chief Milijan Brkic gave Nikola Sulic, in the period between 3 and 20 June 2011, at an unknown location, information on police investigations into Sara Sikiric and Marika Tomljanovic Kiprijanovski,” the file read.

When he was questioned by prosecutorial authorities about the case in 2018, Brkic said that it was “sad” that he was being accused of leaking information on an operation which he had been in charge of in 2011 as deputy national police chief and which had resulted in arrests and a trial.