NOVI SAD -- Monday -- Police in Novi Sad have launched a
manhunt for suspected members of a Satanist cult in connection with desecrating
the Catholic cemetery in the city.
"We suspect a group belonging to a Satanist cult is behind this,"
said police spokesman Stevan Krstic.
"Everything points to a religious ritual and a Satanist rite because of
inverted crosses planted in the ground and digging up of a grave," he told
media.
However, said Krstic, those responsible for previous
desecration of Novi Sad cemeteries had usually turned out to be underage
vandals.
The chairman of the Novi Sad Assembly, Nenad Canak, put the destruction of 85 headstones in the Catholic
cemetery down to extreme nationalism, claiming that it was the work of
"the direct descendents of those who were burying people in mass graves
without headstones".
He said the likely perpetrators were people who did not accept that Novi Sad
was a city populated by people of diverse ethnicity and religion.
The leader of the Alliance of Vojvodina Hungarians, Jozsef Kasza, made an emotional
condemnation of the desecration.
"I condemn this vandalism, regardless of whatever cemetery it happened in.
This is not what we were fighting for on October 5, 2000," he said, in a
reference to the popular uprising which toppled the nationalist Milosevic
regime.