Bosnia probes video of girl tossing puppies into river

9/01/2010 09:30:17 AM

SARAJEVO – Bosnian police said on Wednesday they were investigating claims by a local animals rights group that a Bosnian girl threw half a dozen puppies into a river in a video that sparked global outrage.

Animals rights group "Flekice" filed a complaint to police claiming that the girl seen on the video, originally posted on YouTube, came from the central town of Bugojno, a police spokesman told AFP.

Police will conduct the necessary verifications and inform relevant authorities about the findings, spokesman Sefir Barucija said.

The head of the Sarajevo-based animals group SOS, Velimir Ivanisevic, said his organisation also had information according to which the girl was from Bugojno and the video was made by her brother.

"It is a mirror of society and the fact that young people are doing such things shows how they have been raised," Ivanisevic told AFP.

He warned that only sporadic cases of cruelty against animals get public attention in Bosnia while numerous brutalities go unreported.

Under Bosnian law a person who kills or tortures animals is punishable only with fines ranging from 15 to 5,000 euros .

The 44-second video shows a blonde girl in a red sweatshirt casually taking the squealing black-and-white puppies out of a white bucket and tossing them into the fast-moving river one by one.

The video was removed from YouTube but has been embedded on a number of other sites.

Several Facebook pages have been created dedicated to exposing the girl, who appears to be a teenager.

The video of the puppies surfaced just days after an uproar in Britain over a video which showed a 45-year-old woman dumping a cat in a trash can.

The woman became the subject of an Internet hate campaign after her actions were caught on camera and the footage posted online.

The cat was discovered and rescued 15 hours later.