Unlike the then Mayor of Rijeka, Riccardo Gigante and his associates, whom the new Yugoslav authorities could link to the Fascist regime and execute on 4 May 1945 without a trial near the Church on Kastav, the sympathisers of the autonomist ideas Fiume could hardly get any negative label sewed on to them.
The Autonomists had been themselves victims of the previous fascist regime that had held power in town since the official annexation of the Free State of Fiume by Italy in 1924 and until the end of the Second World War.
[citation needed] In total, 650 people were killed after the entry of Yugoslav Army units into the city without any due trial.
Giuseppe Sincich, a former member of the Constitutional Assembly of the Free State of Fiume, was arrested on the same night and killed in the morning.
These crimes still fail to be officially recognised by Rijeka's authorities nowadays and are a source of continuous internal tensions between the population and the city's elites.