Croatian police have arrested a prominent local surgeon suspected of taking a 5,000 euro ($6,400) bribe from a patient in a rare crackdown on endemic corruption in the European Union candidate country.

The arrest was front-page news in all Friday’s local newspapers, which hailed the special anti-graft squad who made the highest-profile corruption arrest since Croatia’s 1991 independence.

Papers quoted police as saying the surgeon from the northern Adriatic city of Rijeka had allegedly demanded 5,000 euros from a 43-year old woman to set a date for a heart surgery on her father in a local public hospital.

Patients in Croatia, where the ailing public health sector is piling up debt, regularly have to wait for months for more complex medical services.

The woman alerted the police who gave her the money and monitored her meeting with the surgeon, Vjesnik daily reported.

Zorislav Antun Petrovic of the local unit of Transparency International - a non-governmental group that monitors corruption - said Croatia’s health sector had poor legal regulation and lent itself easily to corruption.

“In all our surveys, health, together with judiciary and local administration, tops the list of most corrupt sectors. It is untransparent, with so many grey areas that give rise to bribe, protectionism and manipulation,” he told Reuters.

The European Union, with which Croatia opened membership talks in October, has repeatedly warned Zagreb to step up the fight against corruption and reform the judiciary.

Croatia, which hopes to join the EU around 2010, has launched an anti-corruption campaign this year.

“This event shows that our plan to fight corruption works,” Ante Zvonimir Golem, state secretary at the health ministry, told the Jutarnji List daily.

However, in a recent poll most Croats said they remained sceptical that corruption was going to be rooted out soon.