Croatian Man Who Slashed Bus
Driver's Throat
Was Muslim/Croat Army Veteran
The 29-year-old Croatian man who used a box cutter to slash the neck of a Greyhound bus driver on October the third in Tennessee had fought for the Muslim/Croat army in Croatia's "homeland war" of independence from Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
A Croatian news agency reported that the assailant, whom law enforcement authorities identified as Damir Igric, was a member of the 108th Brigade, which fought in Slavonski Brod in eastern Croatia, where Igric was from and where his family still lives.
The 108th Brigade was made up of Muslim and Croat soldiers and is one of the military units whose soldiers were accused of murdering civilians and destroying Serb Orthodox churches and desecration of Serbian cemeteries.
After attacking the driver, Igric crashed the bus killing himself and five other passengers.
More than 30 people were also hurt in the crash, including driver Garfield Sands, who crawled out of an escape window and went to find help. Sands underwent surgery for the laceration on his neck.
In Croatia, the state-run news agency HINA quoted Igric's stepfather, Ante Spaic, as saying the whole family was "deeply shocked." Croatian TV quoted the family as saying that Igric worked for the last five years on cruise ships. They said they last heard from him several weeks ago, when he was living in New York.
Igric, who had been trained as a locksmith in vocational school, joined the army in 1991, when he was 19, and was discharged in 1993, HINA reported. He had a criminal record that involved drugs and violence, according to HINA and the ambassador of Croatia, Ivan Grdesic.
He never held a steady job, at home or in the United States, where he made his way in 1999 on a 30-day visa.
Grdesic said Igric had relatives in Florida and New York and was working in a restaurant in New York before the crash.
The bus crash happened near Manchester, 50 miles southeast of Nashville on Interstate 24. Igric was thrown through the windshield.
FBI officials said, Igric had entered the United States in Miami in 1999 with a one-month visa, boarded the bus in Chicago. They said the attack aboard a Greyhound bus was the act of a "disturbed individual" who was acting alone and not the act of a terrorist.
On September 11, Muslim hijackers armed with short-bladed "box" knives commandeered four commercial planes and subdued flight crews before crashing the jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the ground in Pennsylvania.