Baculov Worried for Family’s Safety After Vucic Broadcasts Video on TV Pink

Misa Baculov (BETAPHOTO/DRAGAN GOJIC)

Misa Baculov, a councilor of the Be a Hero movement in the Novi Sad City Assembly, said on Oct. 6 he was worried for his family’s safety after TV Pink broadcast a video the night before showing him walking past the city’s railway station three hours before the station canopy collapsed.

Baculov told BETA that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who supplied the video to TV Pink, had sent a message to the public “that I was the one who brought down the canopy that killed 16 people.”

“His madness knows no limits. This is the culmination of his repression against citizens, and now he’s going all in. I don’t know why I’m so important to Vucic that he targets me so often,” Baculov said, adding that “everyone knows that on that morning, Nov. 1 last year, I took the train to Belgrade.”

Novi Sad’s councilman explained that the authorities had long been spreading the narrative that the canopy collapse was a terrorist act, and not the result of their own mistakes or corruption, and that now it would appear he was “the leader of those terrorists who were allegedly behind the sabotage act that led to the fall of the canopy.”

The Serbian president said again on Oct. 6 that it was “very odd” that, as he put it, for 11 months the footage showing Baculov walking in front of the Novi Sad railway station several hours before the collapse had been hidden, and that “a large part of state authorities knew nothing about it.”

“I am convinced of his innocence, although of course I do not rule out the possibility that I am wrong. Whoever would organize something so dangerous and bad would pick someone a bit smarter, but the competent state authorities will show that in the years to come,” Vucic told Serbian reporters in Durres, where he was attending the Brdo-Brioni Process Summit.