"The deputy mayor of Split, Bojan Ivosevic, apologised to Slobodna Dalmacija editor Nikolina Lulic after his behaviour drew public condemnation," state agency said on Thursday.

“My conversation with journalist Nikolina Lulic was inappropriate and I apologise to her once again,” Ivosevic wrote on his Facebook page late on Wednesday.

Explaining his behavior, he said he sometimes had a problem with communicating with other people.

“It happens in situations when I’m totally emotionally committed to a job and in the heat of argument I easily cross the line that shouldn’t be crossed,” Ivosevic said.

He said he was withdrawing from the public eye for a while to work on his communication skills so that such things would not happen again. Matters falling within his mandate will be communicated to the public by the city administration services.

Ivosević “verbally abused” Lulic, the editor of the city news section at the Slobodna Dalmacija daily, over an article published on Tuesday about planting a tree in the city’s Marjan forest park, Hina said.

In a statement released on Wednesday afternoon, Slobodna Dalmacija said that this was a completely unacceptable way of communicating and unacceptable pressure on the newspaper and its staff.

Ivosevic wrote on the city’s social network that this was the first tree planted in Marjan in the last 30 years, and that this was the first time in his life that there had been organised tree planting in the forest park.

After that, Slobodna Dalmacija ran an article about various people and events involved with planting trees at Marjan over the last few years, essentially debunking his claim, which then prompted Ivosevic to call the editorial office and verbally attack Lulic.

The police are investigating the incident.