Was Butcher of Bosnia the REAL hitman behind botched assassination in a Fife town?
Thirty years after shooting that shocked Scotland, extraordinary new revelations about Yugoslav death squad’s secret operation to execute a political activist
WRAPPED up in warm clothes, the bearded gentleman must have felt well-protected from the chill of a Scottish autumn as he took his faithful Alsatian, Pasha, for their regular early morning walk.
As he strolled along Glen Lyon Road in the Fife town of Kirkcaldy, he became aware of a black Austin Metro drawing up alongside and the passenger window being wound down.
Imagining the driver needed directions, he leaned into the open window, only to find himself staring down the barrel of a silenced semi-automatic pistol.
The first two bullets hit him full in the face, one entering through his mouth and smashing his front teeth. Four more ‘pops’ followed in quick succession and the man collapsed to the ground with wounds to the back, thigh and elbow. With Pasha barking madly, the driver sped away down the street.
Witnesses were even more shocked when they learned the identity of the victim lying critically injured on the pavement. Nikola Stedul, a Croatian national, had lived an apparently unremarkable life for 14 years in this working-class housing scheme with his Scottish wife Shirley and their daughters Kristina and Monika.
He ran a chip shop, then a taxi firm, before enrolling in his fifties as a mature politics student at Dundee University. Why on earth would somebody want him dead?
Even as he was being taken to hospital for life-saving surgery, leading miraculously to an almost full recovery, a police manhunt was launched for the shadowy hitman in the black Metro. The sheer scale of the security operation raised eyebrows.
Yet what really stunned the neighbours was the disclosure that the shooting of Mr Stedul was an attempted political assassination, carried out by an agent of a foreign intelligence service.
A secret war fought for decades between the feared Yugoslav secret security service UDBA and its separatist opponents had suddenly spilled over onto the streets of Scotland on October 20, 1988. As a leading anti-Communist dissident masterminding a political campaign against Yugoslavian authorities from his modest council house, Mr Stedul had attracted UDBA’s lethal attention.
The operation to eliminate him, involving weapons smuggled into the UK in diplomatic bags, fake passports and agents masquerading as football fans, could have leapt straight from the pages of a Cold War thriller.
ITS memorable denouement followed the dramatic capture of the man in the black Metro, just as he tried to board a plane from Heathrow later that day. He was exposed as Vinko Sindicic, a Yugoslav ‘master assassin’ suspected of executing at least ten opponents of the state in different countries.
Sindicic, then aged 45, was charged with Mr Stedul’s attempted murder. In May 1989 he was found guilty and ordered to serve a minimum of 15 years in prison. With police snipers guarding the High Court in Dunfermline, the trial judge Lord Allanbridge described his crime as ‘a callous, calculated and carefully planned attempt to murder Mr Stedul’.
Yet as the 30th anniversary of the crime that rocked Scotland approaches, astonishing evidence has surfaced that casts the story in a troubling new light.
While Sindicic undoubtedly pulled the trigger, his victim is now convinced his attacker was neither acting alone nor was he the first choice to carry out the hit.
Investigations carried out by Mr Stedul and others indicate that the man originally sent to kill him was Zeljko Raznatovic, better known to the world as the feared Balkan warlord Arkan.
His very name still strikes dread into those who hold him and his Serbia Volunteer Guard militia, known as the Tigers, responsible for massacres in Croatia and Bosnia as they led the ethnic cleansing in the civil wars of 1991-95.
Those who have always regarded Arkan, the so-called Butcher of Bosnia, as some distant bogeyman will be unsettled to think he came so close to setting foot on Scottish soil. But by the late 1980s, Arkan, like Sindicic, was one of the Yugoslav secret service’s foremost assassins of exiled enemies of the regime.
Following a series of bank robberies and murders, by 1990 there were warrants for Arkan’s arrest in Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland.
But with a copious supply of false passports, he and fellow operatives such as Sindicic moved across international borders with terrifying impunity.
The ease with which they carried out their murderous purpose is reminiscent of the Russian agents accused of carrying out the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury. In a recent interview on Croatian television, Mr Stedul, now 81, disclosed that he had been informed that Arkan and a second man had tried to reach Scotland by infiltrating a group of Yugoslav football supporters on their way to a World Cup qualifier at Hampden.
But the pair aroused the suspicions of Scottish immigration police and they were turned away at Glasgow airport and placed on a flight back to Belgrade.
Mr Stedul says: ‘People who knew more about the whole situation than me have told me that most probably one of the two men who were supposed to come to Kirkcaldy was Arkan.’ Remarka- bly, confirmation of this new version of events has come from Vinko Sindicic himself.
It was always thought that Sindicic led a three-man team ordered to Fife to kill Mr Stedul, and that his role was to be an assassin. But Mr Stedul said it was now clear Sindicic was ‘just supposed to meet them there and give them the weapons and the information about my movements’.
SINDICIC was to assist the men’s escape after the hit, but the killers failed to turn up. He was then ordered to abort the mission – but he refused.
‘I don’t why he decided to kill me himself, but he probably wanted to show off that he could do it,’ says Mr Stedul.
There was also the small matter of the considerable reward for the ‘hit’ which Sindicic could legitimately keep all to himself. For ruthless men like him, Yugoslavia under Tito had been a profitable period. The country, a construct of the post-war desire to impose peace on the Balkans, was an unstable amalgam of ethnic and religious groups.
As Yugoslavia began to break apart, the UDBA stepped up its murderous campaign to stamp out any opposition.
Several of Mr Stedul’s fellow dissidents had already fallen victim to Yugoslav hitmen.
In 1972, Stjepan Sevo, a member of the shadowy Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood, accused by Belgrade of carrying out terrorist attacks against Yugoslav interests, was murdered together with his wife Tatjana and nine-year-old daughter Rosemarie in Italy.
Five years later, the prominent Croatian writer and campaigner Bruno Busic was gunned down on the streets of Paris.
This unchecked wave of political assassinations across the globe – some 68 between 1960 and Tito’s death in 1980 – gave UDBA agents the sense they had an almost
unshackled licence to kill. After the attack on Mr Stedul, MI5 and MI6 were ordered to keep a close eye on any secret agents from Yugoslavia, but this may not have been enough to stop other murders on British soil.
When TV presenter Jill Dando was shot dead on her doorstep in 1999, a secret report was issued by the National Criminal Intelligence Service to Scotland Yard, indicating the murder may have been ordered by Arkan, in retaliation for a NATO bombing of a Serbian state TV station which killed 16 journalists.
Earlier that month, Miss Dando had made a high-profile BBC appeal on behalf of Kosovan Albanian refugees displaced by the civil war, making her a legitimate target in the eyes of the Slobodan Milosevic regime.
The report into her death included information about how the assassin had arrived in the UK and which countries he had travelled through, but the theory was eventually discounted. That it was even plausibly discussed is a stark illustration of the utter disregard for national laws and boundaries shown by men such as Arkan and Sindicic. But in planning Mr Stedul’s murder, such absolute freedom had led to carelessness.
CROATIAN Sindicic was recruited into the Yugoslav secret service in the early 1960s and is believed to have carried out his first mission soon afterwards, infiltrating the Croatian Liberation Movement, precursor to the separatist movement fronted by Mr Stedul.
In 1988, Sindicic travelled under the name of Rudolf Lehotsky, using a passport stolen from a Swiss businessman at a Zagreb hotel. He hired a car at Edinburgh airport under the same name and used it to carry out reconnaissance on his target and to stash guns in nearby woods.
He learned that Mr Stedul was a creature of habit and decided to carry out the job during his daily morning dog walk. But an eagleeyed neighbour, 53-year-old postal worker Eric Martin, had spotted his car in the area the day before.
There had been a spate of breakins locally and Mr Martin believed the man in the car was looking for empty houses. He took down the registration number and, when he spotted the commotion in Glen Lyon Road the next day, he passed it on to the police.
As Sindicic sought to make good his escape after the attack, police traced the car to a Rudolf Lehotsky, travelling to Heathrow. Officers swooped on Sindicic in the nick of time.
At Sindicic’s trial six months later, he denied being an officer of the Yugoslav intelligence services, insisted that he was a victim of mistaken identity and claimed to have been in Edinburgh, telephoning his sister in Yugoslavia, at the time of the attack in Kirkcaldy.
He sat meekly in the dock, eyes like saucers, playing the role of an innocent waiter caught in a monstrous conspiracy. But he could do nothing about the star witness for the prosecution.
Mr Stedul had survived the shooting, albeit with injuries including a permanent limp. His positive identification of Sindicic as his assailant, together with compelling forensic evidence, including gunpowder residue found on his skin, linked Sindicic directly to the shooting.
After the High Court trial lasting 11 days in Dunfermline, the jury unanimously found him guilty of attempted murder.
It emerged that on the day his trial was due to start, a search of his cell uncovered two garottes Sindicic had fashioned, which police believed he intended to use to take his lawyer hostage and make an escape.
Sindicic served ten years in Perth prison, where he quickly became one of its most notorious and feared inmates, and launched numerous appeals over the years, at which he claimed to have been the victim of a conspiracy involving the governments of the UK, Germany and Croatia.
Upon release in 1998, he was extradited to the newly independent state of Croatia to face charges in connection with the murder of Bruno Busic in Paris, 20 years previously.
In court he cut a dash in a white tuxedo and bow tie as his lawyers argued there was insufficient evidence to proceed. The judge agreed and the trial collapsed.
Sindicic has been implicated in numerous murders across Europe, including the killings of the Sevo family, with whom he was meant to be friends, but the Stedul shooting remains the only successful prosecution against him.
Not that he vanished from public view. In 2011, he again hit the headlines when he claimed that an UDBA spy called Ivo D was responsible for the 1986 assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who had incurred Belgrade’s wrath with his outspoken attacks on the Yugoslav regime. The claim was never proved.
Sindicic also gave evidence in the trial of two senior UDBA spies, Zdravko Mustac and Josip Perkovic, who were found guilty of involvement in the 1983 murder of Communist-era dissident Stjepan Djurekovic near Munich.
MUSTAC and Perkovic, who was Sindicic’s direct boss, were jailed for life last year – but Croatia believes the testimony he gave in that case was false and wants to see him prosecuted.
Sindicic was arrested in Spain earlier this year over the affair, but Spanish authorities refused a request to extradite him to Croatia. Sindicic fled to Italy, where he has been in hiding ever since.
In a rambling TV interview given earlier this year to a Croatian television station from an unknown location, Sindicic broke his silence on his role in the Stedul murder attempt, admitting he fired the gun after Arkan failed to appear.
He said: ‘Arkan was supposed to come as one of the supporters of the Yugoslav national team. I didn’t meet Arkan in Scotland but those I was in contact with confirmed that Arkan was definitely there. Arkan went to kill Stedul – that was the original plan.’
Sindicic added that he was set up as a scapegoat for the shooting, adding: ‘I knew as soon as I got on a plane to Scotland that I was going to prison.’
These days, Yugoslavia’s most notorious state assassin claims to be a reformed character and a successful artist, although doubts remain over both assertions.
What is clear is that Sindicic made money from murder, and much of it is spent staying one step ahead of not only the Croatian authorities but also the many enemies he has made over the years.
Now 75, he must still fear he will end up like his one-time UDBA associate Arkan, who died aged 47 in a hail of bullets in a Belgrade hotel in January 2000 as he awaited transfer to The Hague to be tried for war crimes.
As for Mr Stedul, he and his family left Scotland and, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, was finally able to return to his homeland. In 2003, he and his wife settled in Australia, where they first met. One of their daughters, Kristina, still lives in Fife where she works as a sleep therapist.
Ironically, a sleep therapist might prove helpful to Vinko Sindicic. With every waking hour spent looking over his shoulder and every night haunted by the ghosts of his past, one wonders how he ever manages to sleep.