The Osijek municipal office of the Chief State Prosecutor has launched a confidential investigation into Parliament Deputy Speaker and Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) vice-president, Milijan Brkic, his brother Jozo Brkic and two more men - Franjo Varga and Blaz Curic, the two suspects in the fake text messages case - for hacking computer systems.

The prosecutorial authorities did not reveal the identities of the suspects in their press release on Thursday, and they only stated that they had initiated an investigation against the four suspects after receiving a criminal report filed by the police against those four persons for committing “offences against computer systems, programmes and data to the detriment of a number of persons.”

The police statement which was released this past Monday read that members of the National Police Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (PNUSKOK) in Osijek had completed “a criminal investigation into four Croatian nationals, aged 37, 49, 50 and 50, and on 15 April 2019 filed with the Osijek Municipal Prosecutor’s Office a criminal report due to the suspicion that they had committed offences against computer systems, programmes and data to the detriment of several persons.”

“There is reasonable suspicion that over a longer period of time one of the suspects, acting at the instigation and with the assistance of the other suspects, committed a number of offences involving the unlawful interception of computer data and computer abuse, thus unlawfully accessing the content of the injured parties’ user accounts and making it available to the other suspects,” the police statement said.

The prosecutorial authorities say that their investigation is confidential for the sake of protection of private life of the women whose computer systems were hacked.

According to media reports, Brkic was questioned last week for intercepting his former wife’s emails by using the services of Franjo Varga, a former Interior Ministry IT specialist accused in the fake texts case.

The media said Brkic’s brother Jozo was also accused in the interception case and that the police allegedly found out about it by examining the computers and documents seized in the case against Varga and Curic, former chauffeur of Agriculture Minister Tomislav Tolusic and a close friend of Brkic.

The USKOK anti-corruption office suspects Varga and Curic in the fake texts case of obstructing the collection of evidence and of aiding and abetting in the commission of said crime.