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.
PRECARIOUS RELATIONS: Commentators in Saudi Arabia accuse the UAE of growing too bold, backing forces at odds with Saudi interests in various conflicts A Saudi Arabian media campaign targeting the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has deepened the Gulf’s worst row in years, stoking fears of a damaging fall-out in the financial heart of the Middle East. Fiery accusations of rights abuses and betrayal have circulated for weeks in state-run and social media after a brief conflict in Yemen, where Saudi airstrikes quelled an offensive by UAE-backed separatists. The United Arab Emirates is “investing in chaos and supporting secessionists” from Libya to Yemen and the Horn of Africa, Saudi Arabia’s al-Ekhbariya TV charged in a report this week. Such invective has been unheard of
US President Donald Trump on Saturday warned Canada that if it concludes a trade deal with China, he would impose a 100 percent tariff on all goods coming over the border. Relations between the US and its northern neighbor have been rocky since Trump returned to the White House a year ago, with spats over trade and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney decrying a “rupture” in the US-led global order. During a visit to Beijing earlier this month, Carney hailed a “new strategic partnership” with China that resulted in a “preliminary, but landmark trade agreement” to reduce tariffs — but
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) purge of his most senior general is driven by his effort to both secure “total control” of his military and root out corruption, US Ambassador to China David Perdue said told Bloomberg Television yesterday. The probe into Zhang Youxia (張又俠), Xi’s second-in-command, announced over the weekend, is a “major development,” Perdue said, citing the family connections the vice chair of China’s apex military commission has with Xi. Chinese authorities said Zhang was being investigated for suspected serious discipline and law violations, without disclosing further details. “I take him at his word that there’s a corruption effort under
China executed 11 people linked to Myanmar criminal gangs, including “key members” of telecom scam operations, state media reported yesterday, as Beijing toughens its response to the sprawling, transnational industry. Fraud compounds where scammers lure Internet users into fake romantic relationships and cryptocurrency investments have flourished across Southeast Asia, including in Myanmar. Initially largely targeting Chinese speakers, the criminal groups behind the compounds have expanded operations into multiple languages to steal from victims around the world. Those conducting the scams are sometimes willing con artists, and other times trafficked foreign nationals forced to work. In the past few years, Beijing has stepped up cooperation
RSS