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Police Brutality Up Sharply in Yugoslavia, Newspaper Says

From Reuters

Police brutality has sharply risen in Yugoslavia this year, the Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti said on Friday.

The paper reported what it called the latest in scores of incidents of unprovoked police brutality throughout the country.

It said policemen in a Belgrade suburb had brutally beaten a 24-year-old mother this week, dragged her to the police station and left her 1 1/2-month-old baby boy crying in the street.

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Last month, police in the village of Vevcani, in Yugoslavia’s southernmost republic of Macedonia, used electric prods against women and children in a dispute over water supplies.

In Zrenjanin, north of Belgrade, three policemen were jailed for raping a 23-year-old woman, the paper said.

Vecernje Novosti quoted the chief of Yugoslavia’s federal police, Dobroslav Culafic, as saying there was a “process of moral erosion going on in society” which reflected itself in police behavior.

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