Croatian admits killing 5 family members

[Milica]

ZAGREB, Croatia- A Croatian judge is investigating a 46-year-old man on allegations he had killed five people, including his father and his brother's 2-month-old baby.

Judge Svetislav Vujic of the Pula County Court in western Croatia's Istria peninsula, said he opened an investigation against Damir Voskion, who has been placed in a prison hospital in Zagreb, the Vecernji List daily reported Monday.

Police investigators said Voskion, 46, was detained Thursday evening after he went to a police station in the Adriatic port city of Pulaand said he had used a hammer to kill his father Renato, 70, and his brother Dean, 40, in their family house.

Voskion allegedly went to another room and used a pistol to shoot his brother's wife Natasa, 36; her daughter Karla, 7; and her 2-month-old baby son Mauro.

Voskion's lawyer said the suspect killed his family members because they were reportedly poisoning him.

[Kelly]

ZAGREB- A Croatian man shot dead five members of his family, including two children, on Thursday before giving himself up to the police, local media reported.

Jutarnji List daily confirmed on its Web site an initial report by state television of the killings in the northern Adriatic city of Pula.

It said Damir Voschion, 40, killed his father, brother, sister-in-law and two cousins, aged seven years and two months, respectively. Voschion had no criminal record, the daily said.

Another news Web site, Index.hr, said the killer had used a gun to "sort out" a long-standing family dispute and then calmly walked to the nearest police station.

"I killed them all," the Web site quoted Voschion as telling the police.

Thursday's killings was one of the worst incidents of its kind in Croatia since its 1991-95 war of independence from Yugoslavia.

[Kelly]

Troubled children bound tightly to fetid cribs they have never left since birth. A 6-year-old boy who tried to rip off his ear while tied to a chair. A teenage girl who attempted to gouge out her eyes as mental hospital staff stood by and did nothing.

The scenes of horror are chronicled in a report released Wednesday by Mental Disability Rights International, a U.S.-based human rights group that alleges systematic abuse of mentally disabled patients in Serbia's psychiatric hospitals and social care institutions.

Health Minister Tomica Milosavljevic said he had not read the report but conceded that psychiatric facilities had continued to suffer as the nation struggled to recover from a series of civil wars in the 1990s.

But he said the report did not appear to adequately take into account the progress Serbia has made since 2000 to improve conditions in psychiatric hospitals.

"I'm not saying that everything is ideal, far from it," Milosavljevic said. "But ... I don't think that the problems (listed in the report) are illustrating the true situation."

The report could not be independently verified as The Associated Press was not given permission to visit the institutions.

Serbia's mistreatment of the mentally ill was exposed after autocratic President Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown in a popular revolt in 2000. During Milosevic's 11-year rule, health care standards plummeted as government funding was diverted to paying for the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Serbia is not alone in mistreating the mentally handicapped, the group said. Mental Disability Rights International has released similar reports on facilities in Romania, Hungary, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Turkey, Uruguay, Argentina and Serbia's province of Kosovo.

The report attributed abuse and neglect largely to understaffed and underfinanced hospitals. It could represent a setback for the Balkan nation as it seeks to join the European Union.

Serbian Social Affairs Minister Rasim Ljajic did not dispute the allegations, saying "when I visit these places I cannot sleep for three days."

He also ordered that one of the institutions cited by MDRI stop admitting children because it houses more than 500 "severely retarded" patients.

While acknowledging MDRI's main findings, Ljajic criticized the report as "malicious" because it does not "lead to the solution of the problem."

"The mere title of the report, Torment not Treatment, suggests that someone intentionally wants to torment the patients, and that is absolutely not true or acceptable," Ljajic said.

Eric Rosenthal, MDRI's executive director, said the intention was not to accuse anyone of wrongdoing, but to point out problems.

"Our message is a message of hope ... that the Serbian government will make immediate changes," Rosenthal said.

The group said it would send its report to the EU, the United Nations and other international organizations.

It said conditions in Serbia's mental hospitals have vastly improved with help from foreign donors, but much more needs to be done "to address the serious human rights problems that exist for some 18,000" patients.

Some children and adults with disabilities never leave their beds or cribs and some are tied down for "a lifetime" to keep them from harming themselves, it said.

"They eat, they go to bathroom and die in those cribs," Laurie Ahern, MDRI's investigator, said as the group showed a graphic video of the patients and poor conditions in Serbia's mental institutions.

"To tie a person down and leave him in bed for life is tantamount to torture," said Eric Rosenthal, executive director of the Washington-based group.

"I looked into the crib and saw a child who looked to be 7 or 8 years old," the group quoted one of its investigators as saying. "The nurse told me he was 21 and had been in the institution for eleven years. ... I asked her how often he was taken out of the crib and she said, 'Never, he has never been out of the crib in 11 years.'"

Ahern said that the boy, who suffers from Down syndrome and can hardly communicate, is visited by his mother.

"When his mother comes, tears are in his eyes," Ahern said. "She wants to take the child back home, but she has no means to support him."

The report says that many of the children incessantly try to hurt themselves and that the commonly accepted "treatment" for self-abuse is the use of physical restraints.

"The practice actually exacerbates the underlying psychological damage to the person, resulting in continued self-abuse and even more physical restraint," it said, adding that MDRI investigators saw many children at the institution biting and chewing their own fingers.

The group recommended that some of Serbia's mental institutions be closed and their patients be allowed access to "education, employment, decent and safe housing, friends and family based on their disability."