Croatia's state prosecutor's office has published an indictment against a former Serbian police officer for the alleged murder of several Croatian civilians in 1991, including Luka Modric, grandfather of the Real Madrid midfielder of the same name, Split newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija reports today.
Zeljko Badzo, 63, was at the beginning of the Croatian war (1991-1995) commander of a special police unit of Serbian rebels in the town of Obrovac, in central Croatia, near the Adriatic coast.
He is accused of having killed Modric's grandfather, then 61, near his home in the town of Zaton Obrovacki while he was tending his herd of goats. The unit headed by Badzo also allegedly killed six other elderly civilians in the nearby town of Meki Doci.
These types of actions were part of the ethnic cleansing against Croats in territories of Croatia that the local Serbs wanted to include in their rebellious “Serbian Republic of Krajina”.
According to the Croatian newspaper, the judicial process against Badzo began in 2020, when the Croatian Justice requested that he be interrogated in Australia, where he lived at the time, but so far he has not been located.
Luka Modric, winner of the Ballon d'Or in 2018, said in his autobiography that his grandfather was the most important person in his childhood and that his death was something he never managed to understand.
