A car bomb exploded on Thursday outside the offices of a Croatian newspaper in central Zagreb, killing the owner and former editor-in-chief of the weekly and a second employee, reports said.

Police confirmed that two people were killed and one injured in a blast from a device placed under a vehicle owned by Nacional newspaper.

"The car was completely destroyed and two men were killed," police official Krunoslav Borovec told reporters. He refused to elaborate on the victims' identities.

The explosion occurred at 6.20 pm outside Nacional's offices, television reports said, quoting colleagues who confirmed the identities of the victims.

"According to our current knowledge Ivo Pukanic was killed," Plamenko Cvitic, a Nacional journalist, told national television.

The television station reported that the other person killed was Nacional's chief of marketing Niko Franjic.

The area was cordoned off by police, an AFP correspondent said.

Pukanic (47), considered one of Croatia's most controversial journalists, previously survived a gun attack in downtown Zagreb in April. The attacker was not found.

In 2003 he published an interview with former Croatian general Ante Gotovina, two years after he fled following a war crimes indictment by The Hague-based UN tribunal.

A number of attacks have occurred in the Croatian capital in recent weeks, including the mafia-style killing of the daughter of a prominent lawyer earlier this month.

Prime Minister Ivo Sanader sacked his interior and justice ministers, plus the head of the national police, after the suspected mafia killing.

A journalist and two businessmen have also been severely beaten but the perpetrators have not been found.

AFP