New verdict: Split soccer fans to spend 30 days in jail

Shutterstock

Belgrade’s High court sentenced 13 soccer fans of the Split Hajduk FC to 30 days in prison under suspicion of endangering the safety and committing a massive theft at a petrol station on a motorway near the capital last Thursday, the Beta news agency reported.

Fourteen fans of the Hajduk football club from the southern Croatian coastal city of Split have each been sentenced to 15 days in prison and banned from entering Serbia for a year, a Belgrade court ruled earlier.

The longer-term came in less than 24 hours after the initial one.

The other 13 fans who were brought before the court have been acquitted but will remain in police custody until the 48-hour detention order issued earlier expired.

An earlier police statement said that one of the arrested was suspected for writing the Ustasha graffiti, but it was not clear whether that would be a part of a new judicial proceeding.

The court president Milan Marinovic told Tanjug news agency that the fans were punished for „inappropriate, rude and wanton behaviour in a group.“

All the convicted fans have been sent to serve their sentences in Padinska Skela prison, outside Belgrade. They have the right to appeal.

The fans stole about 200,000 Serbian Dinars (Euros 1,680) worth of goods from the petrol station in Belgrade’s Vrcin suburb on Thursday while on their way to Sofia for a game against local side Slavia.

One of them was suspected of spraying graffiti with symbols of the Ustasha Nazi regime that ruled Croatia during World War II. They were arrested on Friday on their way back from Bulgaria.