By Dragana Dardic BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters) - Dark memories of a bloodthirsty friar nicknamed Brother Satan have been revived as Pope John Paul held mass at the site of a monastery linked to a World War Two massacre of Orthodox Serbs. Over 2,000 from a village near what is now the main Bosnian Serb republic city of Banja Luka were slaughtered in the 1942 atrocity by Croat forces of the Nazi-allied Ustashe regime. The 83-year-old pontiff, on his first visit to the Orthodox Serb part of Bosnia, appealed for reconciliation between Serbs, Croats and Muslims after their bitter 1992-95 war. He also asked Serbs to forgive the wrongs of the Catholic Church. "From this city, marked in the course of history by so much suffering and bloodshed, I ask almighty God to have mercy on the sins committed against humanity, human dignity and freedom, also by the children of the Catholic Church, and to foster in all the desire for mutual forgiveness," the pope said in a homily on Sunday. In World War Two the Petricevac monastery was home to a Franciscan friar, Tomislav Filipovic Majstorovic, who became known as Fra Sotona or Brother Satan. According the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, he combined religion with political ideology and is said to have taken part in the massacre, slashing the throat of a child with the words: "This is the way I baptise these bastards in the name of God." The friar became commandant of the Ustashe concentration camp at Jasenovac, where he is said to have killed freely. On Sunday, relatives of Ustashe victims lit candles at a monument in the village of Drakulici, as the sound of singing drifted from the papal mass for some 50,000 pilgrims. "It is a creepy fact that the pope holds a mass at Petricevac," said Jovan Babic, who has investigated the massacre in which dozens of children were also killed. "If he knew what are the links between Petricevac and the massacre, he would have never held the mass there," Babic added. Nedjeljko Glamocanin, whose entire family was killed in the Ustashe onslaught, said the pope was not welcome in Banja Luka unless he apologised but there would be no violence. Bosnian authorities were taking no chances. Some 4,000 police backed by troops of the NATO-led peacekeeping force were providing security for the pope's one-day visit. Two days before he arrived several known Serb hardliners were taken into detention. Shortly before the pope's plane touched down, traffic was held up while police checked a suspect car, later found to be harmless. Posters saying "Pope Go Home" appeared briefly in the city but were quickly removed. Two years ago, one man died when an angry mob of Bosnian Serb nationalists attacked a crowd celebrating the reconstruction of a mosque in Banja Luka.
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