When Will Police Stop Protecting Bully Pukanic?

Without any provocation, Ivo Pukanic assaulted Javno’s photographer Fillip Hofer, wrenching his camera out of his hands.

ZAGREB, CROATIA – The Javno editorial desk most harshly condemns the latest in a number of attacks on reporters, with the latest victim being Javno’s photographer Filip Hofer this afternoon. In contrast to recent assaults on reporters, this time the assailant is well known and the police will have a difficult time finding excuses not to punish the attack, the illegal snatching of a camera and the destruction of someone else’s work.

To the disgrace of the entire journalistic profession, the attacker and his accomplice, come from our ranks. They are a newspaper publisher and permanent columnist of the Nacional weekly, Ivo Pukanic, who himself began his journalistic career as a photographer and knows very well where photographers are allowed to take photos. When Pukanic saw that our photographer was taking photographs of him, he angrily jumped off his brand new motorcycle, snatched the camera out of the photographer’s hands and handed it to a Nacional photographer, telling him to take the memory card out of the camera and wipe out all photos from it. The photographer listened to his boss and joined him in the assault against a colleague. It needs mentioning that at the time, our photographer was in a public area, in Vlaska Street, where taking photographs is allowed. He was violently and illegally prevented from doing his work by his colleagues, no less.

Thus, the editorial desk of the Javno news site is requesting an urgent reaction and condemnation of this act from the Croatian Journalists’ Association, since that same association had at one point bestowed on Pukanic the most prestigious journalistic award.

We are demanding of the police to conduct a serious investigation, in any case, much more serious than they had conducted their investigations when Pukanic’s wife had repeatedly reported him to police for domestic violence. The police should not have any trouble finding witnesses because Pukanic is, as it is well known, still under police protection, so we guess there were police officers nearby who are protecting him 24/7. And when they question those police officers, they could also ask them how often the person they are protecting has broken the law without them even trying to stop him. And whether the bully is still carrying a gun in his belt.

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