After the Green Action NGO on Wednesday said that plainclothes police officers illegally entered their Zagreb premises on Monday, the Zagreb Police Department said in a statement for the Croatian state news agency Hina that the police had been looking for a man who was arrested nearby on Tuesday.

For the past six days the police had been looking intensively for the 41-year-old man suspected of unauthorised taking of pictures, grand theft, theft and stalking.

The investigation was launched after the man climbed the balcony of a 25-year-old woman’s flat in the city’s neighbourhood of Crnomerec, from where he took pictures of her, after which he would escape on a bicycle.

Focusing on downtown Zagreb in their search for the man, the police on Monday spotted a suspicious bicycle in a courtyard in Frankopanska Street, which was why they searched it.

During the search, a man came out from a room on the east side of the courtyard but as he saw the police, he flinched and shut the door, which gave the police the impression that he wanted to escape so they knocked at the man’s door to establish his identity but realised soon as he answered the door that he was not the man they were looking for and in doing so, they showed their official badges.

The police stressed that the man did not want to cooperate or answer their questions about the suspicious bicycle, so their operation there ended.

The police continued the search and on Tuesday morning arrested the wanted man at the junction of the city’s main Ilica Street and Frankopanska Street.

Green Action NGO’s head Luka Tomac told a press conference earlier in the day that the illegal entry of the police to their Zagreb premises without any identification or a warrant was unacceptable.

Tomac said that more than five men entered the NGO’s premises on Monday, looking for “migrants and people of poorer financial status”.

Their colleague there did not know they were crime police officers because they wore thick jackets and looked serious and harsh, he said.

They were arrogant, yelled, and intimidated him, and only later, after our colleague said he would call the police, one of them flashed his badge, Tomac said.

The police arrived at our call, they talked to the group of men outside, but did not explain what those men were doing in our yard for more than an hour, Tomac said. He underscored that only when he called the police later, they informed him that those had been crime police, but without revealing their intent and reason for their actions.