Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died.
The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight.
It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government.
Photo: AFP
The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths.
In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into the corruption aspect of the case, leading to Friday’s arrests.
The 11 include former Serbian construction, transport and infrastructure minister Tomislav Momirovic, as well as former acting director of the state-run Serbian Railway Infrastructure company, Nebojsa Surlan, prosecutors said.
Another former transport minister, Goran Vesic, who was one of the first to resign after the accident, was wanted in the case, but was hospitalized on Thursday, prosecutors said.
The Nova.rs news site said Vesic underwent emergency surgery on Friday.
Two companies — China Railway International and China Communications Construction (CRI-CCC) — as well as France’s Egis and Hungary’s Utiber were in charge of the railway station works.
According to the prosecutor’s office, the two former ministers and three other suspects enabled CRI-CCC to charge more than US$1.2 billion for work and then carry out additional work worth more than US$64 million.
This enabled CRI-CCC to obtain an “illegal financial gain” of more than US$18 million, the statement said.
Since the accident, protests have been growing across Serbia, with some bringing hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to demand a transparent investigation and early elections.
Thousands of people rallied in new protests late on Friday in several cities, including the capital, Belgrade, to commemorate nine months since the accident.
“It’s a fight against the system, for which human lives are worth less than the amounts thrown around in the public tenders,” one student taking part in a demonstration in the city of Novi Sad said.
An American scientist convicted of lying to US authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen, China, to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain. Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and restoring movement in paralyzed people. It also has potential military applications: Scientists at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting
Jailed media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai (黎智英) has been awarded Deutsche Welle’s (DW) freedom of speech award for his contribution to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The German public broadcaster on Thursday said Lai would be presented in absentia with the 12th iteration of the award on June 23 at the DW Global Media Forum in Bonn. Deutsche Welle director-general Barbara Massing praised the 78-year-old founder of the now-shuttered news outlet Apple Daily for standing “unwaveringly for press freedom in Hong Kong at great personal risk.” “With Apple Daily, he gave journalists a platform for free reporting and a voice to the democracy movement in
PHILIPPINE COMMITTEE: The head of the committee that made the decision said: ‘If there is nothing to hide, there is no reason to hide, there is no reason to obstruct’ A Philippine congressional committee on Wednesday ruled that there was “probable cause” to impeach Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte after hearing allegations of unexplained wealth, misuse of state funds and threats to have the president assassinated. The unanimous decision of the 53-member committee in the Philippine House of Representatives sends the two impeachment complaints to deliberations and voting by the entire lower chamber, which has more than 300 lawmakers. The complaints centered on Duterte’s alleged illegal use and mishandling of intelligence funds from the vice president’s office, and from her time as education secretary under Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Duterte and the
As evening falls in Fiji’s capital, a steady stream of people approaches a makeshift clinic that is a first line of defense against one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics. In the South Pacific nation — a popular tourist destination of just under a million people — more than 2,000 new HIV cases were recorded last year, a 26 percent increase from 2024. The government has declared an HIV outbreak and described it as a national crisis. “It’s spreading like wildfire,” said Siteri Dinawai, 46, who came to be tested. The Moonlight Clinic, a converted minibus parked in a suburban cul-de-sac in Suva, is
RSS