Yugoslavia Sent a Hitman to Scotland. A Neighbour's Envelope Beat Him

He became personal secretary to dr. Branko Jelic, one of the most prominent exile leaders in Europe, with access to his files, his letters, his membership lists.

The officers noted their new man was very bright, decisive, quick to react, good in Italian and German. In further correspondence, the report says, we will run him under the pseudonym Miso. By May 1969, the tasking on paper was to study all possibilities of an offensive action against dr. Jelic, an action, the document specifies, in which Miso personally and alone would take part, all the more since Miso already now absolutely accepts such a solution.

German police suspected Sindicic; he was never charged, and he has always denied it.

Sindicic was elsewhere by then, and surfaced across the border in Rijeka. Italian investigators asked Yugoslavia for permission to question him. Yugoslavia refused, and never gave him up. He was never charged, and he has always denied this too, insisting decades later that he had said goodbye to the family at a train station and that these are the truths.

France investigated, closed the file in 1982, and to this day no French court has named a killer. Years later, under oath in Zagreb, Sindicic himself would testify that weeks before Paris he had been sent to London with another man to kill Busic there, and that he, by his own account, sabotaged the plan and sent his partner home.

On the Wednesday morning, a postal officer named Eric Martin came out in the early dark and caught the car in his headlights, parked beside his daughter's, with a man inside who ducked out of sight and then drove off. Martin had been reading his local paper, the Fife Free Press, which that autumn was full of a spate of break-ins. So he did what a careful man does about burglars. He took an envelope and wrote down the registration number.

The first two rounds had hit Stedul in the face: one full in the mouth, shattering his teeth and tearing through toward the back of his neck, the other just above his lip. More rounds hit his body as he lay there, one lodging close to his spine, one passing through his thigh, one grazing his arm. At the old Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh they transfused him with warmed whole blood to hold off shock, and counted themselves, in their own word, witnesses to a miracle.

Eric Martin's envelope went to the Police National Computer; the number came back as an Avis hire to a Rudolf Lehotzky; and Avis could add one more thing: the gentleman had just flown to London. When the shuttle emptied at Heathrow, the Metropolitan Police were at the gate.

The accused said he had come to Scotland to ask Mr Stedul for help, and had been near Glen Lyon Road on earlier days but never quite got as far as making contact. As to the morning itself, he had an alibi: at the moment of the shooting he had been on the phone to Yugoslavia. His sister, his mistress and a friend all flew in to swear to it. The jury also heard that firearms residue had been found on his skin.

Lord Allanbridge told him: you have been convicted of a cold-blooded offence. This was a callous, calculated and carefully planned attempt to kill Mr Stedul, and Mr Stedul is very fortunate to be alive today. Fifteen years for the attempted murder; the firearms counts ran alongside, concurrent. When it was over, police officers in the courtroom shook Stedul's hand and kissed his wife. The family had spent six months in protective custody.

Its content was a script. Deny everything. Explain your contacts as chance acquaintances. The essential thing, it said, is to stay silent, to endure, even when it seems everything is known. And then the line that turns a coaching note into a contract: as for the thing up there, when it comes, nothing. The family will collect it, and it will be OK.

The other went to the Consulate General of Germany in Edinburgh, under the subject line: preferment of criminal charges against Zdravko Mustac and Josip Perkovic, in connection with the murder of Bruno Busic in Paris. The German federal registry stamped it on the ninth of September 1998. Sixteen years later, that letter would be read aloud in a Munich courtroom.

Croatian press photographers caught the arrival: the prisoner of Perth coming down the aircraft steps in handcuffs, a justice-police officer at each side. Croatian memory would dress the homecoming up later, a white suit, a bow tie, a satisfied smile, but the camera saw a man in a tan jacket being led down the stairs, and his first address in free Croatia was a remand cell.

In March 2000 the court acquitted him, not proven, and five years later the Supreme Court made the acquittal final. Even Vukusic, no friend of the defendant, conceded on the page that objectively, no irrefutable proof had been produced. No one else was ever tried for Bruno Busic, before or since. The man Scotland convicted walked out of the Zagreb courtroom free, and prospered.

When it sentenced Prates to life, the Munich judgment spelled out, in writing, why the old hitman had turned: because Perkovic had abandoned him during and after the Scottish sentence, and had embezzled the assets entrusted to him in 1988. Had Perkovic proven cooperative, the court wrote, Sindicic would have had reason to go on protecting him.

This court did not believe him. It said so, treated his evidence as unreliable, and then convicted Perkovic and Mustac anyway, on the documents and on the mole's paper trail, to life imprisonment, upheld on appeal in 2018.

The day before he died, a letter had arrived at the Zagreb flat. It was from Vinko Sindicic. It demanded that Stedul publicly deny the assassination attempt, declare the whole thing a manipulation. His wife and daughters read it, looked at the man they had nearly lost to the sender thirty-four years earlier, and decided he would not spend an hour of whatever time remained on it. They never gave it to him.

And two weeks after that, from their Croatian prison cells, Josip Perkovic and Zdravko Mustac, the generals serving life for the Djurekovic murder, filed to take over his prosecution personally, as private prosecutors: the convicted, prosecuting the witness, for lying about them. As of this summer, the court in Rijeka has not answered.