ZAGREB, 7 Oct 2021 - The Zagreb Municipal Court has sentenced Boris Štitić, 36, to two years and four months in prison pending an appeal for attempting to extort money from three members of the national COVID-19 crisis management team - Alemka Markotić, Krunoslav Capak, and Vili Beroš, Jutarnji List daily said on Thursday.

Štitić, a Slovenian and Croatian citizen, is a nurse with three convictions for fraud.

Under the latest sentence, he must also pay over HRK 10,000 in court costs. He has been released from detention, in which he had been since October 2020, and the stay behind bars will be counted towards the final sentence.

Although he claimed he was innocent at the start of the trial, he eventually confessed, justifying his actions with the COVID restrictions and the impossibility to see his child, who lives with the mother in Slovenia, during the pandemic, although a few weeks before sending threatening e-mails to the three officials, they spent several weeks on the coast.

The court did not find any mitigating circumstances, finding as aggravating that Štitić attempted to extort money from persons engaged in the fight against the pandemic and committing the offenses in an, especially odious manner, without any empathy for others, subjecting the victims to stress by making death threats against them and their families.

On 30 September 2020, Štitić sent e-mails to Markotić, Capak, and Beroš in which he said they would die unless they paid €100,000 in the Monero cryptocurrency.

Markotić is the director of Zagreb's Dr. Fran Mihaljević Infectious Diseases Hospital, Capak is the director of the Croatian Institute of Public Health, and Beroš is the minister of health.

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ZAGREB, 4 Oct 2021 - The Croatian Chamber of Physicians said on Monday it supported mandatory COVID certificates in the health sector as a measure that would contribute to patients' safety, adding that protests against them in or near hospitals disrupted the peace patients need for their treatment.

The chamber said patients' health and safety should come first to all health workers, adding that 95% of physicians had either been vaccinated against coronavirus or recovered from COVID.

The chamber said it was confident the few doctors and a minority of other health workers who had not would be tested every week, adding that regular testing was part of the measures introduced in line with the law protecting the population from infectious diseases and rules preventing hospital infections.

There is no acceptable justification to refuse testing because that directly harms the safety of patients, the chamber said.

Chamber of Nurses distances itself from protesting members

The Croatian Chamber of Nurses too said it supported the decision on mandatory COVID certificates in the health sector, distancing itself from a dozen of its members who protested outside several hospitals this morning against mandatory certificates and testing.

Several dozen nurses are protesting outside hospitals against measures preventing COVID-19 instead of honoring medical rules, getting tested, and working with patients, the chamber said, adding that 72% of nurses have been vaccinated, plus those that have recovered from COVID.

The chamber said it was unacceptable of individuals outside the health sector to attempt to use the situation and manipulate workers in the sector, and once again called on the nurses who have not been vaccinated yet to do so as soon as possible.

About 50 protesters booed Health Minister Vili Beroš outside the KBC Zagreb hospital this morning.

Outside the KBC Split hospital, a group of disgruntled citizens and several hospital staff insulted the hospital director and grabbed some physicians by the arm.

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