Morales assassins: Bolivia gang "fought in Balkans"

[Jan Klimkowski]

Eduardo Rosza Flores in Dying for the truth (John Sweney)

Magda - great find.

Eduardo Rosza Flores' performance reminds me of Garrison in JFK:

"One may smile, and smile and be a villain."
Goddamn it! We've got one of them.

For background on the clip above, Rosza Flores' "International Brigade" and the murder of journalists, see earlier in this thread, eg page 3:

In Rozsa Flores' own words (see my post #14 above):

Eduardo Rozsa Flores is a journalist who became a soldier. He was born in Bolivia from a Hungarian father and a Spanish mother. He arrived to the South Slav war as the Spanish-language correspondent of the BBC; then he decided to join the Croatian side as a volunteer fighter.

This suggests to me that he was a freelance stringer who managed to get accredited by the BBC at the beginning of the 1990s Balkan Wars.

Other posts in this thread (eg #22) suggest that the Croatian International Brigade, which he led, was not a conventional fighting unit. It was rather a Tudjman-sanctioned dirty tricks unit. Clearly, Rozsa Flores didn't want his funders to become known (intriguingly Opus Dei is mentioned):

handing out the orders to the British mercenaries in Osijek is a sinister young Spanish gentleman by the name of Eduardo Flores, a man whose name crops up with ever increasing frequency in investigations of the deaths of British photographer Paul Jenks and Swiss reporter Christian Wurtenberg in January ... around the time the BBC team filmed the "Dogs of War".

In fact, Searchlight can exclusively reveal for the first time, information about Flores' well travelled background.

Only 32 years old and claiming to be without military experience (despite sporting para wings), Jorge Eduardo Rosza Flores commands the so-called International Brigade (PIV) based in Osijek.

To get there has been a long journey involving several political mutations and numerous contacts with the twilight world of armies, secret services and quasi fascist religious organisations.

Born in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to spanish catholic mother and Hungarian Jewish father, Flores spent his formative years in Budapest, where in his teens he was an active member of the communist youth movement.

In fact, he is not without military experience, having done his military service in the Hungarian army as a border guard at Budapest airport, where he reportedly met the notorious international terrorist "Carlos".

In 1988-89 Flores' career took a new direction when he started to work with the Barcelona paper La Vanguardia as an assistent to Ricardo Estarriol, the paper's East European correspondant and an active member of the secretive rightist Catholic organisation Opus Dei.

Both men made regular trips to Vienna to visit the Opus Dei offices there and Flores mantained close contact with this historically pro-fascist Catholic organisation.

Before being assigned by La vangaurdia to Croatia, where he was to jettison his laptop computer in favor of a rifle, Flores was covering events in Hungary, Albania and Slovenia, the province in which German government insired seperatists had already begun to drive the first stakes into the hearts of Yugoslavia. Arriving in Croatia in late August 1991, Flores immediately announced that he had enlisted in the so-called Croatian National Guard and was posted to the village of Lazlovo, close to the Serbian border and populated by ethnic Hungarians.

Within weeks of his arrival, Flored had made an impact and had found allied in the shape of American Croatian Johnny "Bob" Kosic and one "Jura" a Hungarian from the village. Between them, on 3 October, they cooked up the idea of an international brigade, which gained instant recognition from Franjo Tudjman's Croatian authorities.

The conduit for the promp legalisation of the new force was Branimir Glavas, the head of the local militia in Osijek, which was to later become the base for Flores unit.

Foreigners began to flood in as recruits. Among them were the top Portugeuse sniper Alejandro Cunan Fernandez and Alejandro Hernandez Mora, a Spanish mercenary and an explosives and sabatoge expert. Also among the new arrivals was Stephan Hannock, the welshmen known as "Frenchie" because his claimed background in the French Foreign Legion.

Other recruits, who brought the brgade's strength to around 100, included a French group sent by the fascist Front National.

Other FN members found ther way into the ranks of the more explicitly fascist Black Legion, which is attached to the 15,000 strong Armed Croatian Forces (HOS) militias and based at Vukovar, about 22 miles from Osijek.

Journalists from across Europe have wanted to lift the lid on the freelance killers operating in Croatia. For Christian Wurtenberg and Paul Jenks, this curiosity was to prove fatal.

Wurtenberg working for a Swiss news agency, decided to investigate alleged links between Flores and trafficking in weapons and drugs by joining the International Brigade, despite oppostion from his editors.

In addition, he hoped to uncover evidence of right-wing extremists amongst the mercenaries who decorate their rooms with swastikas and to establish precisely who was paying them.

After serving with Flores' outfit for a few weeks. Wurtenberg secretly told Spanish television reporter Julio Cesar Alonso that very soon he would leave the brigade and return to Switzerland.

Days later, on 4 January, Alonso and a Porteguese televeision reporter, Joso Pinto Amaral, were taken from Zagreb's Hotel Intercontinental to the headquarters of the Croatian secret police. They were later interrogated.

After the questioning, Flored told the two journalists there was a mole in the brigade and that the mole was Swiss and "had to be got rid of", adding that his forces would not kill him but that they would be killed by Serbians in an ambush.

The journalists tried to warn Wurtenberg but found he had already been placed under arrest. Desperate, they travelled to Osijek only to be met by Flores who told them with a grin "By the way, we've got a loss - Christian. The Swiss problem has been sorted out."

The "sorting out" was brutal. According to teh autopsy at the Osijek hospital, Christian Wurtenberg "was killed on 6 January 1992 as a result of mechanical action with a blunt weapon and later strangulation with hands and rope".

Flores claimed later that Wurtenberg was murdered by "Chetniks" (Serbs) but in fact strangling is almost unknown among them. Prisoners simply have their throats cut.

Wurtenberg's computer went missing and his diary was returned to his family with vital pages ripped out, while the Croatian media launched a cover up of the cause of his death. When it leaked out some days later, alarm spread among the foreign journalists working in Zagreb.

On 13 January, Paul Jenks and a colleaugue Hassan Amini, visited the International brigade to ask questions about what had happened to Wurtenberg. The man they met was Stephen "Frenchie" Hannock who, in response to Jenk's persistent questions said "who knows ... who cares. I dont, for one and I know a lot more than you."

Flores was due to arrive so "Frenchie" asked the 2 photographers to leave. Nevertheless, Flores learned of thier presence and later went to the Osijek press centre to give them "his version" of the events surrounding Wurtenberg's murder.

He never met them, but four days later Paul Jenks was shot through the head at the front line in Briest, near Osijek. Officially he was killed by a Serbian sniper hidden some 900 metres away in the Serbian held village of Tenski-Antunovac, but the positions of Flores' International Brigade were much closer. The indications are that the range was far shorter than 900 metres and there are suggestions that the bullet did not enter his heead from the direction of the sniper.

A mere two days later after Jenks killing, Flores was on the telephone again to give "his version", telling Julio Alonso in Spain: "It is not very convenient being a journalist." Strong suspicions now exist about the roles of both the sinister Flores and "Frenchie" in the deaths of the two journalists.

Like the dirty war being fought by Flores and other rightist killer gangs in Croatia, the truth about the murder of Wurtenber and Jenks has been covered up.

What they discovered about the sources of funds, the role of Opus Dei, the involvement of extreme rightists and the weapons and drugs rackets may never be known. Flores and "Frenchie" have ensured that.