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.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the