The Interior Ministry stated on Thursday that Operation Koridor is targeted against migrant smugglers and that communication through encrypted application messaging between authorised official persons is not disputable.

The Interior Ministry gave this response after last November the no-profit-making newsroom Lighthouse Reporters had been provided with 60 screenshots containing excerpts from communication between senior Croatian police officials in a WhatsApp group conducted from August 2019 to February 2020.

The group was named after an operation called “OA Koridor II- Zapad” in which police cover western parts of Croatia and the aim of the operation is to protect the state border against illegal migrants.

Media outlets such as Lighthouse Reports, the Novosti weekly, the Telegram news portal, NOVA TV, the German Der Spiegel and the Austrian ORF allege that the police use the WhatsApp group as an informal mode of communication on official actions targeting migrants.

“The WhatsApp group was used to exchange information about apprehensions of more than 1,300 people of mostly Afghan, Pakistani and Syrian nationality. These messages were often accompanied by photos of the individuals, their faces clearly visible, in some cases being forced to lie face down on the ground or remove their shoes,” says Lighthouse Reports

“Experts and police sources told us that sharing such information on a privately-owned platform such as WhatsApp breaches multiple police regulations,” it added.

The Interior Ministry responds to those media outlets that it does not possess the actual messages and that it cannot comment on individual messages nor confirm their authenticity.

As you are probably aware, there are services on the Internet that create messages following the model set by the WhatsApp messaging application, the ministry says in its response.

It also says that Operation Koridor is aimed primarily against smugglers whose victims are migrants.

The ministry says that the media outlets referred to events that happened four years ago, and pointed out that the WhatsApp group concerned was deleted three years ago.

Any action taken by the police towards other persons is registered in police records, regardless of whether that person is a smuggler, migrant or somebody else.