Ribicic Case Stumbles on First Obstacle
The case against Mitja Ribicic, the former senior Communist official who is suspected of having played a major role in the summary killings of civilians after the Second World War, has stumbled at the first obstacle: the supreme state prosecutor proposed on Monday, that a special team of historians be set up to investigate the matter, but the investigating judge rejected the motion four days later. The motion will now be taken over by a panel of three judges.
Ribicic, appeared before the investigating judge, but he only read a statement. His lawyer Peter Ceferin revealed that the prosecution accuses Ribicic of having been decisively involved in the killings of 217 people based on an annotation which was added to some of the detainees from a list of detainees. The annotation read: "in line with the file of comrade Major Mitja". But Ceferin said that he was unable to find any such file, that it is not known who wrote it, who wrote the annotations or if the file even exists.
Ceferin said that the prosecution itself does not have a clear picture of the case, which is why it requested a team of historians be set up to answer whether "Ribicic's name on the list actually means that he too had a say in the killings". Another question to be addressed is, according to Ceferin, who actually was "comrade Mitja", as Ribicic used his partisan nickname Ciril during the war.
Charges against Ribicic were filed in May 2005 in what was the first time that the police filed genocide charges in relation to the reprisal killings of the Yugoslav Communist regime. Last April, the prosecution changed them into crimes against civilians. Ribicic used to be the deputy security chief for Slovenia in the OZNA security and intelligence agency of the then Yugoslavia. He also held numerous other high posts in the former Yugoslavia in the years after.
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