After last week's arrest of Skender in Austria, it is expected that his network of accomplices and protectors will soon fall into the hands of police. A special unit of the Austrian police specialized in the battle against the drug mafia arrested Ivan Skender 43 and three other men in the town of St.
Veit am Vogao, not far from Graz on 13 August Ivan Skender, with residence in Solin Croatia, near Split, but officially registered in Grude, Herzegovina, has been known to the Croatian public as the leading Croatian drug boss since the fall of After months of surveillance and cooperation with the Croatian authorities, the Austrian police arrested Skender and his associates at the village graveyard when he tried to sell two kilograms of cocaine to an undercover officer.
Skender was armed with a handgun at the St. Considering the price of cocaine, the earnings on the street from the resale of drugs confiscated in the joint action by Austrian and Croatian police near Graz would have been about , Euro. Skender was first heard of when Feral Tribune published a transcript of a working meeting in the Presidential Office held on 3 March Tudjman began the discussion on the Croatian drug mafia and criminal underground. They all knew that Skender, acting in the shadows, had excellent connections in the influential military and civil structures, by which he controlled the Zagreb, Split and Herzegovinian drug and weapons markets, and who also delivered to the IRA and Kosovo Liberation Army, while stolen vehicles from Croatia were sent to Yugoslavia via Herzegovina.
Nacional was the first to begin investigating who Ivan Skender really is. He is well protected by the civil and military police, and the HDZ politicians close to them. All under the knowing eye of several of the leading SZUP figures at the time.
Frequently, the drugs were hidden among arms which were under strict control, in well sealed trucks which entered into Croatia through Hungary. They frequently sent convoys of expensive automobiles in that direction, under the police escorts of Colonel Maglov, recently accused of reselling drugs, while heroin came from the east in return.
