Croatia is considering a request to prosecute a former Macedonian interior minister over the murder of seven Asians who were made to look like Islamic militants bent on attacking Western targets.
"We received an official request from Macedonia today to prosecute Ljube Boskovski and we have forwarded it to the state prosecutor's office. The ball is in their court now," a justice ministry official told Reuters on Monday.
Boskovski, who also has Croatian citizenship, fled to Croatia shortly after Macedonia charged him and six former members of the security forces with murder in May.
They are accused of smuggling the migrants - six Pakistanis and one Indian - into Macedonia from Bulgaria, murdering them in a staged ambush and altering the crime scene to make them appear as if they were armed Islamic militants intent on attacking Western embassies.
The aim was to ingratiate Macedonia with the West by showing it was doing its bit in the US-led war on terror.
Under Croatian law, Zagreb cannot extradite its own citizens for trial to another country.
Boskovski lives in the northern Istrian peninsula and has given several interviews to Croatian media, denying all charges.
The victims were killed in March 2002, six months after the September 11 attacks in the United States.
At the time, Christian Orthodox Macedonia was recovering from a five-month ethnic conflict with separatist Albanians, who are mostly Muslim.
Boskovski insists he has taped evidence of conversations between Albanians and terrorists planning an attack on the US embassy in the Macedonian capital Skopje.
At the time, the interior ministry said the migrants had opened fire after police ordered them to stop in a rural area north of Skopje.
The West chose not to press the issue with Skopje, but some diplomats privately questioned the circumstances of the ambush.
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