Zagreb - Thousands of German and Croat soldiers captured in the final days of the Second World War were coldly executed and buried in mass graves found in western Croatia, human rights activists said Wednesday in Zagreb, demanding that authorities investigate.

The site at Harmica, 50 kilometres north-west of Zagreb, holds the bodies of 4,500 soldiers, including 450 German army officers, executed by the communist partisans, Ivan Zvonimir Cicak of the Croatian Helsinki Committee told a press conference.

Zagreb - Croatia will temporary suspend visa requirements for some countries in an effort to boost tourism, Croatian Tourism Minister Damir Bajs said Wednesday.

The ministry proposed scrapping visa requirements for Russian and Ukrainian citizens during the summer season, and also for Chinese and Indian citizens, Bajs said.

Zagreb - Croatia is investigating a mass grave of German and local soldiers executed in the wake of World War II, the deputy president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Ivan Zvonimir Cicak, said Friday.

The site at Harmica, 50 kilometres north-west of Zagreb, on Croatia's border with Slovenia, presumably contains 4,500 bodies of German soldiers, including 450 officers, executed by Yugoslav president Tito's partisans, Cicak told the German Press Agency dpa.

Zagreb - Croatia's national team coac

Zagreb - The Croatian parliament Wednesday ratified with an overwhelming majority Croatia's membership agreement with NATO, paving the way for the country's full membership in the alliance next month.

Only one representative was against ratification, while 119 were in favour.

Speaking before the vote, Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader said that NATO is not only a military alliance but an "alliance of values" which has given Europe six decades of peace and prosperity and that with it "Croatia will become an exporter of security."

Zagreb - A Croatian court on Monday sentenced retired general Vladimir Zagorec to seven years in prison for the theft of 5 million dollars' worth of diamonds from a government safe and ordered him to return the money.

In 2000, Zagorec, then an active officer and assistant defence minister, embezzled the diamonds deposited in the defence ministry treasury.

The gems were deposited in the ministry's treasury seven years earlier after a murky weapons deal, at a time when Croatia was fighting a Belgrade-backed Serb insurgency on a third of its soil.