A COURT in Mostar Yugoslavia has sentenced two Catholic priests to eight and five-and-ahalf years in gaol on charges of anti-state activities, the national news agency Tanjug reported.
Tanjug gave no other details of the trial of Fathers Ferdo Vlasic and Jozo Krizic, prists in a Franciscan monastery in Duveno, a town near Mostar. It said they were editor-in-chief and secretary of a Catholic magazine published there.
Relations between Yugoslav communist authorities and the Catholic clergy have become strained since Albanian nationalist riots last spring in the southern autonomous province of Kosovo. Since the riots, in which at least nine people were killed and scores injured, the authorities' sensitivity to dissent, particularly dissent based on nationalism, has increased.