The extent to which the prosecution and the police are caught in the grip of political influence is vividly illustrated by the incident in which Belgrade Mayor Aleksandar Šapić is suspected of striking Tatjana Mićić, a councilwoman from the Kreni-Promeni movement.
First, it should be stressed that the office of the mayor carries absolutely no immunity whatsoever. In this situation, therefore, the police and the prosecution should have acted just as they would have if the incident had involved an ordinary citizen, only with even greater scrutiny, given that the person involved is a public official.
Instead, the opposite happened. Unlike in other cases in which SNS supporters attacked citizens and journalists and the police simply refused to take any action, in this case Šapić was given preferential treatment in a much more subtle way, primarily by the Third Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office. Through its public statements, the prosecution created the impression that it was taking action, while in substance a number of procedural failures occurred that cannot reasonably be described as accidental.
In practice, when situations like this occur – where one person injures another in a physical altercation – the suspect is usually detained for up to 48 hours, allowing the prosecutor to prepare the case and be ready to question the suspect, while also preventing the suspect from destroying evidence or influencing witnesses during that time.
However, in order to avoid detaining the mayor, the prosecution manipulated the interpretation of the injured party’s medical report, which documented fractures of the nose and upper jawbone with displacement – injuries that, in most cases, constitute serious bodily harm.
The first step normally taken when the police find all participants in an incident at the scene, as happened here, is to send the injured person for a medical examination if there are visible injuries. This is done both to provide medical treatment and to establish the legal classification of the injuries.
This was, in fact, the only thing that was handled properly in this entire case. Everything that followed can only be described as an elementary legal botch job, and a deliberate one at that.
As soon as the prosecution issued its first statement, it was possible to suspect that Šapić had effectively been given room to avoid detention. The statement claimed that Šapić could not be detained because the injured party had not submitted her medical documentation and because police officers had been unable to locate her, something that later turned out to be false.
Reading the statement, one was left with the impression that police officers had accompanied the injured woman to the initial examination, where her injuries were first classified as minor, but that the officers then somehow mysteriously lost track of her after she was referred for a specialist examination by a maxillofacial surgeon, where, lo and behold, she was diagnosed with serious bodily injuries.
This was also the only justification offered for why Šapić had not been detained and why the prosecution had supposedly been unable to legally classify the offence. Only someone with no knowledge whatsoever of criminal procedure could believe such an explanation – which describes a substantial portion of Serbia’s citizens, something the prosecution was evidently counting on.
How the authorities should actually have proceeded
Under our criminal justice system, the injured party has absolutely no obligation to prove anyone’s guilt. That is the responsibility of the prosecution and the police. In this case, however, the opposite occurred, and responsibility for the authorities’ failure to do their job was shifted onto the injured party.
The council woman whom Šapić is suspected of striking and seriously injuring had no further obligation to do anything after reporting the incident. This means that she was not required to submit the medical report either to the police or to the prosecution.
If the injured woman was accompanied by police officers, as the prosecution claims, the officers should have waited until she had completed the entire medical examination. They should then have obtained a copy of the medical report and asked the doctor who examined her to state what injuries she had sustained and how severe they were.
If police officers are not present during such an examination, the doctor conducting the examination has a legal obligation to notify the police that a person has presented at the medical facility with injuries inflicted by another person. The police then come to the medical facility, where the doctor informs them about the nature and severity of the injuries, after which the police must immediately notify the competent prosecutor.
Given all of this, it is simply astonishing that the prosecutor’s office handling the case issued a second statement after Kreni-Promeni published Mićić’s medical report on social media, clearly showing fractures of the nose and jawbone. The prosecution nevertheless stated that it had still not received the report, even though the document shows that the examination was carried out at around 1:30 a.m., while the prosecution’s statement was issued approximately 12 hours later.
If what the prosecution stated is true, this could mean either that the doctor who examined the injured woman failed to notify the police, which is almost impossible, or that the doctor did notify the police but the police failed to inform the prosecution. Given the prosecution’s vague and unconvincing statements, however, the public has reason to suspect that the prosecution may in fact have been informed of everything but simply did not wish to take action at that point.
Had proper procedure been followed, the prosecution would have known the severity of the woman’s injuries by around 2 a.m., and Šapić would probably have had to be detained for up to 48 hours – something that apparently was not considered an option.
As a consequence, instead of presenting his defence the following day where he was supposed to – at the prosecutor’s office – Šapić defended himself at a press conference, using his official position to address the public.
Valuable time was also lost during which evidence could have been collected and witnesses to the incident, as well as the injured party, could have been questioned without the risk of the suspect influencing them.
The extent to which the police and prosecution apply different standards became apparent the very next day, when a confrontation took place in Novi Sad between SNS activists and members of the Students’ List, during which a young man was suspected of striking an SNS activist.
He was promptly located, the prosecution immediately ordered the police to secure all video recordings of the incident, and within a few hours the young man was arrested in almost cinematic fashion – his hands cuffed behind his back, his clothing dishevelled, as masked members of the intervention unit wearing body armour escorted him away.
Of course, the footage also showed several SNS supporters kicking a man while he was lying on the ground. But the police will take their time dealing with that. It will probably take them several days merely to establish who those individuals are, and even once they do, those people will not be arrested as though they were major criminals. Instead, they will most likely receive summonses, appear at the prosecutor’s office accompanied by their lawyers, give statements, and that will probably be the end of the matter.
Given that the election campaign has only just begun, we can only imagine how the institutions will “do their job” on election day.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 05.10.2026.