Zagreb County Court ruled on Friday that the life sentence handed by a German court to former Yugoslav-era secret police official Josip Perkovic should be converted into 30 years in jail.

Perkovic (73) had been tried in Germany along with another Yugoslav secret police official, Zdravko Mustac (76), for ordering and organising the assassination of a Croatian émigré Stjepan Djurekovic in 1983 in Germany.

At the time, Perkovic was in charge of the Zagreb branch of the Yugoslav secret police, charged with tracking Croatian émigrés and their political activities abroad.

Following years of legal wrangling, Perkovic and Mustac were eventually extradited to stand trial in Germany in 2014 and were both found guilty in 2016 by a Munich court which sentenced them to life imprisonment.

After their verdict, they were granted a request to serve their sentence back in Croatia. However, this then raised the issue of how to convert their sentence, as Croatia’s criminal code does not include life imprisonment and proscribes a maximum jail term of 40 years, reserved for only the most severe of crimes.

Perkovic’s defence laywers earlier called for his German sentence to be converted to a 20-year prison term in Croatia, as that had been the harshest sentence in then communist Croatia at the time of Djurekovic’s murder.

However, the Zagreb court ruled that the law currently in force in Croatia should be applied to Perkovic’s case, handing him a 30-year sentence. His now has the right to appeal the decision before Croatia’s Supreme Court.

Friday’s ruling only applies to Perkovic, as the sentence to Mustac will be decided by another court in the town of Velika Gorica outside Zagreb, where Mustac had resided before extradition to Germany.

Perkovic and Mustac are both still in prison in Germany, and they are expected to be returned to Croatia in January 2019 at the earliest.

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