BELGRADE: 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 November 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 prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government.
The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths.
In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organised crime opened another probe into the corruption aspect of the case, leading to Friday’s arrests.
The 11 include former 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 hospitalised 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 $1.2 billion for work and then carry out additional work worth more than $64 million.
This enabled CRI-CCC to obtain an “illegal financial gain” of more than $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 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. - AFP
