The television reporter pointed down a grey Belgrade street and said to the elderly woman next to him: “Mrs Fehir, there’s your son.”
It was December 10, 2025. Krunoslav Fehir was clutching a bundle of clothes in black nylon bin bags and walking towards his mother, Ankica. She burst into tears, overwhelmed by her son’s release from Serbian custody despite a six-month prison sentence for war crimes.
The emotional reunion marked the beginning of the end to a decades-long, cross-border saga that originated in the war-torn town of Osijek, eastern Croatia, in 1991 and featured three key protagonists: Fehir, his father Josip, and their wartime commander, powerful Osijek warlord Branimir Glavas.
When the saga began, Fehir was 16 years old, and a witness to war crimes. In 2025, when he turned 50, he was still waiting for it to end. And end it did.
In June this year, six months after Fehir’s release from Serbian custody and 35 years after the war crimes he bore witness to, the perpetrators – Glavas among them – were finally sentenced by a court in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
The Osijek war crimes case against Glavas and his subordinates lasted 19 years since the first indictment was issued in 2007. On June 10 this year, Fehir, the key witness, was vindicated, morally and judicially, though he still awaits an appeals court ruling in Serbia regarding his sentence from December.
The story first broke on July 15, 2005, when the Croatian weekly Feral Tribune published a frontpage story by journalist Drago Hedl headlined ‘We Killed on Glavas’s Orders”.
According to Hedl’s story, a former member of Glavas’s ‘Osijek Battalion’ had told Croatian prosecutors about the torture and execution of Serb civilians by Glavas’s men, detailing how two of the victims were “forced to drink car battery sulfuric acid” before being beaten and killed. The source spoke to Hedl, but the story did not name him.
Two days later, Josip Fehir, Glavas’s wartime deputy, told reporters in Osijek that his son, Krunoslav, had gone missing. A truck driver for a local brewery before the war, Josip read from a written statement and refused to answer questions. Another two days later, he read again from a written statement, accusing his son of responsibility for an explosion at the Osijek police station in 2001. At the end of his press conference, Josip said: “My son was the source for the story in Feral.”
In his 2010 book Glavas: Chronicle of Destruction , Hedl wrote that Josip had denounced his own son, “sacrificing him in favour of his wartime companion, Glavas”.
Recruited, aged 16
Sixteen-year-old Krunoslav Fehir (left) on the front line near Osijek in winter 1991 with fellow soldier Josip Tkalec Šmeki. Photo courtesy of Krunoslav Fehir.
By the time his father went public, Fehir was already under police protection. For his own safety, he was moved from Osijek, in the eastern Slavonia region, to Zagreb and then the coastal city of Pula in the far west.
Fehir spent a decade in Pula, testifying persistently, relentlessly to the crimes he said he saw. He returned to Osijek in 2015, where he found work driving a taxi.
Once he had been outed, Fehir didn’t hide. He talked to journalists whenever they approached him, and gradually his story was told.
In June 1991, as Yugoslavia began unravelling, Fehir was 16 years old and planning to go to neighbouring Hungary, where his school had been relocated because of the fighting that was spreading in Croatia. But his father, Josip, didn’t want him to go. Instead, he recruited Fehir into ‘Branimir’s Osijek Battalion’, where Josip was Glavas’s deputy.
In the 2006 documentary Dossier Osijek , made by Belgrade broadcaster B92 and still available on YouTube, the young Fehir, then 17, is seen armed and in uniform, but still quite clearly a child. He calls on everyone to “defend Croatia”, saying: “I can defend it even though I’m 17 years old, just like my father defends it.”
Josip, also in uniform, adds: “I want to give my child something, and your child, and everybody’s child in Slavonia, in Croatia… When we realise that, there will be no war. Only peace and love.”
Josip declined to comment for this story. His son quickly came to see what war was all about.
On August 31, 1991, while guarding the garages of Glavas’s headquarters in downtown Osijek, Fehir witnessed the incarceration, torture and killing of two local Serb civilians – Cedomir Vuckovic and Djordje Petkovic.
In May the following year, he left the battalion and became a police officer, a job in which, by all accounts, he excelled. Fehir never said a word about what he saw and heard in 1991, but neither did he make peace with it. By 2005, with Glavas’s star waning following his expulsion from the ruling Croatian Democratic Union party, HDZ, Fehir’s moral crisis had become too much for him.
He decided to talk to Hedl, an Osijek native and journalist renowned for his reporting on war crimes, but only after first giving a statement to prosecutors…
Read the full article at Balkan Insight (BIRN) →
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