in Springfield, Missouri due to his health problems. Artuković was prosecuted by the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice as the "Butcher of the Balkans". He was ordered extradited to Yugoslavia on 11 November 1986, where he was tried in the Zagreb District Court. He was found guilty of: ordering the deaths of a lawyer and former member of the Yugoslav National Assembly, Dr. Ješa Vidić, in early 1941; ordering the deaths by machine-gun fire of 450 men, women and children in late 1941 because there was no room for them in a concentration camp; ordering the killing of the entire population of the town of Vrginmost and its surrounding villages in 1942; and ordering the execution of "several hundred" prisoners at Samobor Castle near Zagreb in 1943 by having them driven into an open field, where they were machine-gunned and then crushed by tanks. The court held that Artuković's intent had originated with "his Ustaša orientation, by which persecutions, concentration camps and mass killings of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, as well as Croats who did not accept the ideology, were part of the implementation of a program of creating a 'pure' Croatia." In sentencing him to death, the court described him as one of the "ruthless murderers, who under the cover of 'protecting purity of race and faith' and with the aim of realising their Nazi-Fascist ideology, [... ] killed, slaughtered, tortured, crippled, exposed to great suffering, and persecuted thousands and thousands of people, among whom were women and children." He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out due to his age and poor health. Death Artuković died of natural causes in prison hospital in Zagreb on 16 January 1988. His son, Radoslav, requested information about his father's burial from the Yugoslav authorities. A special law was passed in Yugoslavia that the remains of those convicted and sentenced to death but who escaped execution, were to be disposed of as those of executed persons. It is unclear what happened to his remains. In 2010—at the request of one of Artuković's sons, Radoslav, a California native—the president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Ivan Zvonimir Čičak, called for authorities to investigate what happened to the remains. Footnotes References Books Websites 1899 births 1988 deaths Ustaše People from Ljubuški Yugoslav anti-communists Croatian collaborators with Fascist Italy Croatian lawyers Croatian nationalists Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina