Vandalizing statues can land you with a fine and even jail time. When a man brought down the bust of a famed anti-fascist resistance leader in Split, Croatia, retribution came in the form of a broken leg.
The 65-year-old man will undergo surgery after Wednesday’s incident, when the falling statue of Rade Končar broke his leg, AFP reports. Končar fought against Croatia’s Nazi-backed Ustaše regime during World War II.
The Croatian newspaper Telegram called it “karma,” while a centrist politician joked on Twitter that the famous resistance leader was still breaking “the legs of fascists 76 years after they shot him.”
Končar was a Yugoslav war hero, who was captured by Italian forces in the early 1940s. He was executed by firing squad in 1942.
The Ustaše regime was responsible for killing tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croatians.
Activists have accused Croatian officials of ignoring the uptick in far-right sentiment in recent years.
Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Holocaust research group, warned in the Jerusalem Post in 2016 that Croatia’s “troubled history continues to plague its present and threaten its democratic future.”