Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomasevic said on Wednesday, at an event commemorating the 31st anniversary of the murder of the Zec family, that the city administration would put up a plaque to commemorate Marija Zec and her daughter Aleksandra, killed on Mt Medvednica overlooking the city.

“Even though we know the names of the then members of the Ministry of the Interior who killed Mihajlo Zec in his home in Zagreb’s Tresnjevka district on 7 December 1991 and abducted his wife and 12-year-old daughter to the Adolfovac mountain lodge on Mt Medvednica, where they killed them, they never answered for the crime,” Tomasevic said.

“I believe it is very important for the most senior officials of the state and the City of Zagreb to mark this sad anniversary, as well as to put a memorial at this place as a permanent reminder of the crime committed, so that something like that never happens again. The City of Zagreb will do it, a procedure is under way to put a memorial plaque at this location,” the mayor said at the event organised by the Antifascist League and the Serb National Council (SNV), calling on Zagreb residents to build a society free of any discrimination.

Among those attending the commemoration were Deputy Prime Minister Anja Simpraga, SNV president Milorad Pupovac, Antifascist League president Zoran Pusic, and the ambassadors of Norway and Serbia.

“We have come here to seek the courage that is necessary to identify the ill-intentioned downplaying of the circumstances of this crime, to learn that courage and the solidarity to support one another,” activist Masa Samardzija said on behalf of the Antifascist League.

“Everything that happened that fatal night caused the suffering and the silence of all, both members of the Serb community, who could feel threatened, and those who condemned the murder of the child and its parents but did not have the strength to say it in public,” said Samardzija.

Members of a special police unit under Tomislav Mercep came to the home of the Zec family in Zagreb’s Tresnjevka district shortly after 11 pm on 7 December 1991 and shot dead 38-year-old Mihajlo Zec as he tried to escape. Marija and Aleksandra, who witnessed the murder, were then taken in a van to the Adolfovac mountain lodge on Mount Medvednica, where they were killed and the mountain lodge was burned down. The perpetrators were identified as Munib Suljic, Sinisa Rimac, Igor Mikola, Nebojsa Hodak and Snjezana Zivanović.

One of the murderers, Sinisa Rimac, later became the then Defence Minister Gojko Susak’s bodyguard and was decorated by President Franjo Tudjman, the SNV noted in a statement issued on the 30th anniversary of the crime in 2021.

The two surviving family members, children Dusan and Gordana Zec, were paid one-off compensation in 2004 and that is the only support they received from the state, the SNV said.

Aleksandra, Marija, and Mihajlo Zec are buried in Gornja Dragotinja (near Prijedor, northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina), Mihajlo’s native town.