Ilija Vučić was born in 1929, in Blatnica near Čitluk.
Ilija Vučić
While Ilija Vučić was on his way to work, passing by an abandoned building on Hausteigstrasse in Stuttgart, in the early morning hours of June 6th, 1975, he was killed from behind. The assassin shot Vučić in the back five times. Five days later, on June 11th, Vučić died of his severe wounds at the Katharinen Krankenhaus hospital in Stuttgart.
Ilija Vučić was born in 1929, in Blatnica near Čitluk. Preparations for Vučić’s assassination began a few months earlier, with the UDBA spreading rumors that Vučić embezzled the organization’s money – more than 300,000 DEM. Emigrant Vinko Jurkić from Kotor Vareš near Sarajevo allegedly believed the rumor and spread it most persistently.
Shortly after Vučić’s murder, German police suspected Jurkić of being one of the participants in the murder, as he had, meanwhile, disappeared from Germany. From January 1970, Jurkić had indeed worked for the Sarajevo UDBA under the pseudonym “Journalist”, and he maintained contact with Tomislav Kokor. At the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kokor was the head of the SIS of the Sarajevo HVO, and later the chief of staff of the President of the Federation of BiH, Krešimir Zubak. (In 1975, the same Krešimir Zubak interrogated, provoked, humiliated and mocked Fra Josip Zvonimir Bošnjaković in the premises of the UDBA in Brčko, in connection with the arrest of the Plehan guardian Fra Miroslav Cvitković).
After retiring, thanks to good relations with Franjo Topić, Vinko Jurkić volunteered in the sports section of the “Napredak” Cultural Society. A few years later, he began to feel unsafe in Sarajevo, so the Bosnian and Croatian UDBA relocated him to Zagreb, where he was given an apartment on Prilaz JNA Street, now Prilaz Đure Deželića Street, and a license to work as a taxi driver at the main bus terminal and on Preradovićeva Street.
According to the testimony of his cousin, Stjepan Matičević from Kotor Vareš, he had previously played a role of provocateur during his trial, after his brother Ivica Matičević – Žuti and Mato Prpić were killed in a skirmish with members of the UDBA and the police in October 1974, near Gospić. Jurkić, who was taken in by Ivica Matičević upon his arrival in Germany, testified before the court that Stjepan Matičević was the homeland connection for the two diaspora terrorists.
Allegedly, Vinko Jurkić’s main guardian in Zagreb was Franjo Vugrinec, one of the heads of the Croatian UDBA in Zagreb, and a long-time party secretary in the state UDBA.
Sources:
Bože Vukušić, UDBA’s Secret War Against Croatian Emigrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zagreb, 2002.
Anto Kovačević, A Man and His Shadow, Zagreb, 2012.
Fra Josip Zvonimir Bošnjaković, Suffered Times, Zagreb, 2013.
Editorial board/crimesofcommunism.net
