While insisting the government was not at fault, Goran Vesic, Serbia’s Minister of Transportation, Construction, and Infrastructure, has stepped down following last week’s tragedy in Novi Sad, where 14 people died after a railway station canopy collapsed.
The concrete canopy was part of the original 1964 design. However, the station had undergone recent renovations as part of a project to construct a high-speed rail line to the Hungarian border. The Chinese contractor, who was responsible for the renovations, stated they had not performed any work on the canopy.
Vesic informed reporters in Belgrade on Monday that he had offered his resignation to President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday, immediately after the tragedy. However, he chose not to make any public statements during the three-day mourning period.
“I will officially tender my resignation to the president tomorrow,” Vesic said.
He maintained that neither he nor his department was responsible for the collapse, as they had no control over the quality of construction work.
“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 for the work, two foreign companies were responsible for supervision, and 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 obtain a construction permit. Vesic was appointed to his current post in October 2022.
According to the minister, the canopy was not included in the project scope. However, local authorities and some opposition politicians claim that a glass and steel cover was constructed, potentially overloading the 1960s structure, which was suspended from the station roof using steel cables.
The cables snapped on Friday, just before noon, crushing the 17 people sitting or walking beneath. Three people survived, but remain hospitalized in critical condition. Among the victims were children.
Pro-Western opposition activists used the Novi Sad tragedy as a platform to demand the resignation of the entire Progressive government and call for 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.