Britain's Foreign Office is warning visitors to Croatia this summer to beware of a threat from organised crime, following a number of assassinations and attacks on prominent figures, reports Matt Prodger.

"We heard a very loud and low noise, something like voooom!"

On the evening of 23 October 2008, Irena Scuric was eating pizza with her daughter in a restaurant less than a minute's walk from the offices of one of Croatia's most popular newspapers, Nacional, when they heard a blast.

"We saw the car, which was burnt," she tells me, pointing at parking bay number 38, the tarmac of which is still pitted with shrapnel scars.

"There was a little bit of smoke around and the doors were open. And then we saw two bodies covered with plastic."

The bodies were those of Ivo Pukanic, Nacional's editor, and its marketing chief Niko Franjic, killed by a bomb planted beneath the car.

Ivo Pukanic was a controversial figure - an outspoken journalist who wrote about organised crime. He had friends in high places, including Croatia's president, and in low places, with close links to one of the country's most notorious gangsters.

Most agree that it was his stories about a Balkan cigarette smuggling operation which cost him his life.

Two weeks before Ivo Pukanic's murder, 26-year-old Ivana Hodak, the daughter of a well-known lawyer, was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment block in central Zagreb.

Police say they have now caught her murderer - a homeless man, who they say acted alone.

Others are sceptical, and tell a murkier tale which dates back to the Balkan wars, and involves a former general, missing gemstones, a kidnapping and a prominent mobster.

I caught up with Ivana's father, Zvonimir Hodak, shortly after his client, the former general Vladimir Zagorec, was jailed for seven years for stealing gems meant to fund Croatia's war effort in the 1990s.

He does not believe the police story of his daughter's death, and believes she was murdered by criminals with an interest in the Zagorec case.

"I'm convinced that this was a message to me from some organisation," he tells me, as we sit beneath a framed photo of his daughter on the wall of his office.

"They knew that if they killed her they would hurt me most," he says, his voice breaking with emotion.

"I wish they had killed me."

This is not the picture postcard Croatia familiar to visitors to the Dalmatian coast. The latest advice from the British Foreign Office warns of "an underlying threat from terrorism and organised crime in Croatia". READ MORE ON THE WEBSITE OF THE BBC.