Police Director Nikola Milina said on Monday that the father suspected of killing his three minor children is still in hospital and as soon as he is discharged, he will be arrested.

“The police are present in the hospital and will continue an investigation as soon as the suspect is discharged. The police are collecting information and are taking all the necessary actions to shed the light on all the circumstances of this homicide, one of the most horrendous crimes registered in Croatia so far,” Milina said.

He confirmed that the father, an Austrian national, had never been reported for domestic violence and that the police had never had any need to conduct any interventions in the family in which three minor children were killed in the early hours of last Saturday.

Asked by the press if the father could be transferred to a psychiatric hospital, Milina answered that that did not depend on the police and that an assessment would be made by competent medical institutions.

Commenting on the trauma experienced by the police officers who were the first to arrive in the flat in Zagreb where the triple homicide was committed, Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic said that not one human being could possibly ever be prepared to see a crime of that nature.

During police education and physical training, we work on the psychological preparations of young police officers. However, there are always some extreme situations to which people respond emotionally. That’s why we have experts specialised to provide psychological support and assistance to other employees to be able to go back to their everyday lives, he said.

Upon arriving on the scene at the flat in the Mlinovi neighbourhood at about 2 am on Saturday, police found a man in a poor state and three children who gave no signs of life. A doctor who arrived on the scene confirmed they had experienced a violent death, while the man was hospitalised.

The Zagreb County Prosecutor’s Office said that an Austrian national, born in 1965, was suspected of the murders.

The media reported that Harald Kopitz of Vienna, who lives and works in Zagreb as a financial consultant for a number of big companies, is suspected of murdering his three children. They added that the children’s mother works in a hotel in Dubrovnik and that the children were spending the weekend with the father.