Revealed, UK ministers’ fury with Yugoslavia over Fife assassination attempt
IT WAS a moment that stunned Scotland and sent shockwaves across the world.
And now declassified files have revealed that the UK Government wanted to ‘give the Yugoslavs a well-deserved kick’ following the attempted assassination of a Croatian exile in Fife in October 1988.
Nikola Stedul, an exiled political activist and campaigner for Croatian independence, was shot six times and badly wounded outside his home in Kirkcaldy by Vinko Sindicic.
Sindicic, believed to have been an agent of Yugoslavia’s notorious secret service, the UDBA, was arrested at Heathrow airport while trying to flee the country after the attack. The following year, he was convicted at the High Court in Dunfermline of attempted murder.
Secret Foreign Office documents now show that for more than two years, the Government was embroiled in a fiery debate over how to respond to the attack.
Plans to retaliate were reluctantly dropped after an appeal by Sindicic and turmoil in the Balkans complicated matters.
Following Sindicic’s conviction in May 1989, MI5 told the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd they had little doubt that he was acting under orders from Belgrade and that officials at the Yugoslav embassy in London had almost certainly assisted him.
On August 2, 1989, Mr Hurd’s principal private secretary wrote to the Foreign Office: ‘The Home Secretary... sees good reason for concluding that the Yugoslavs were behind Sindicic’s shooting of Stedul and he believes some mark of our disapproval must be made.’
Although Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe favoured expelling the Yugoslav ambassador in London, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir John Fretwell, warned against it.
He wrote: ‘However satisfying it would be to give the Yugoslavs a well-deserved kick, it would not necessarily be in the long-term British interest.’ A plan to instead expel the ambassador’s deputy, Branko Brankovic, became complicated when Sindicic lodged an appeal against his conviction.
The legal process dragged on for a year and, by the time the appeal was dismissed in November 1990, Brankovic had already returned to Yugoslavia as political turmoil began to engulf the Balkans.
Mr Stedul, who ran a fish-andchip shop in Kirkcaldy, died in July this year.