Serbian minister resigns over train station deaths

The government was blameless, Infrastructure Minister Goran Vesic has nonetheless insisted

Goran Vesic, Serbia’s minister of transportation, construction and infrastructure, has resigned over last week’s tragedy in Novi Sad, when 14 people died after a railway station canopy suddenly collapsed.

The concrete canopy was part of the original 1964 design, but the station had been renovated recently as part of a project to build high-speed rail to the Hungarian border. The Chinese contractor said it had not done any work on the canopy, however.

Vesic told reporters in Belgrade on Monday that he offered his resignation to President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday, immediately after the tragedy, but did not want to make any announcements during the three-day mourning period.

“I will officially tender my resignation to the president tomorrow,” Vesic said.

He insisted, however, that neither he nor his department bore any blame for the collapse, because they had no way to control or monitor the quality of the construction work.

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“I call on the authorities, most of all the prosecutors, to establish as soon as possible who is responsible for this horrible accident and who among the planners, contractors, supervisors and investors caused the deaths of 14 innocent people,” Vesic told reporters.

A Chinese consortium was contracted to do the work, two foreign companies were responsible for the supervision, while the infrastructure branch of Serbian Railways was the principal investor, he explained. The contract for rebuilding the railway station in Serbia’s second-largest city was signed in 2018 but it took until 2021 to secure a construction permit. Vesic was appointed to his current post in October 2022.

According to the minister, the canopy was not included in the scope of the project. According to local authorities and some opposition politicians, someone ended up building a glass and steel cover that may have overloaded the 1960s structure, which was hung off the station roof by a series of steel cables.

The cables snapped on Friday, just before noon, crushing the 17 people who were sitting or walking below. Three people survived and are still in hospital in critical condition. There were children among the dead.

Pro-western opposition activists cited the Novi Sad tragedy to demand the resignation of the entire Progressive government, and new elections.

In his resignation speech, Vesic condemned “those who try to use any tragedy, who think that every death is their chance to get into power.”

The Novi Sad station was built in 1964. The modernist project was the work of architect Imre Farkash, and was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. It had fallen into disrepair after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, which destroyed the railway and road bridges across the Danube in Novi Sad. Its reconstruction was part of the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed rail project that Vucic and his government promoted as a major achievement.