Ex-spy confirms political killings

For decades, Yugoslavia’s secret police hired mercenary killers, including a notorious mobster-turned-warlord, to assassinate Yugoslav dissidents living in other countries, a former agent said in an interview.

The comment by Dusan Stupar, who led the spy agency in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, in the 1980s, was the first time that a senior ex-intelligence officer has spoken about the alleged killings.

The spy agency of then-communist Yugoslavia has long been suspected of ordering execution of more than 70 mostly Croat, Kosovo Albanian and Serb emigres in Western countries from 1946 to 1990. Yugoslavia broke up in a civil war in the 1990s.