BIRN: Number of Coronavirus Deaths Tampered With Only In Serbia And Iran

Milorad Ivanovic/BIRN(Photo:PrintScreen YouTube)

The editor-in-chief of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), Milorad Ivanovic, stated on May 27 that, before the newly formed Working Group for analyzing the deaths during the covid-19 epidemic, the relevant authorities should provide the answer about who had decided for data to be deliberately tampered with in April last year.

Ivanovic told BETA that this answer should be provided by the prosecution, "which has been silent and playing dead" for months now. He pointed out that, besides Iran, Serbia was the only country where open tampering with the number of the infected and dead from covid-19 has been discovered.

"If one reads the news about the forming of the working group today, one may get the impression that there had been a problem in our country with the method of counting the infected and deceased from corona, and that the Serbian government now wanted to correct it. There have been such cases in the world, in Great Britain and Italy, for instance, where the authorities decided, after a while, to change the method of counting the dead and infected," Ivanovic said.

"Perhaps many things have indeed deteriorated in this country, but we do have excellent physicians and medical staff who have done their job with dedication. BIRN was assured of that when we accessed the government's Information System. However, someone in Belgrade then said that data from this database would not be publicly announced, but deliberately lowered," he stated.