Serbian police say they are investigating the collision on a road that left a local opposition activist in Kraljevo in hospital – which his lawyer has called ‘strange’.
Serbian police said they are working to establish facts about the unexplained attack on Predrag Vostinic, a prominent opposition activist from Kraljevo, central Serbia, who was knocked off his bike by a car driver on Sunday with license plates from Novi Sad, a city in northern Serbia. Vostinic is currently in hospital and has fractures to the hand and a head injury.
“Members of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kraljevo … are intensively working to establish all the facts and circumstances of the traffic accident that happened last night, at around 7:30 p.m., in Adrane, near Kraljevo, in which a forty-eight-year-old cyclist was injured,” the police announced on Monday.
So far, police have determined that the 24-year-old driver of the Skoda car was under the influence of alcohol, and an additional analysis was ordered by the prosecutor.
Predrag Vostinic is a prominent member of Local Front, LF, an opposition activist group. Vladimir Beocanin, his lawyer and also a member of LF, told BIRN that there are suspicions that the attack was politically motivated.
“It is strange. The driver first tried to push him when he went around him [Vostinic], then he did a semi-circle across the roundabout and went again at him, even though he [Vostinic] was in the opposite direction of the car,“ Beocanin told BIRN.
“Vostinic is a prominent figure in Kraljevo. This needs to be examined properly,” he told BIRN.
He said there was information that the suspect is a cadet of the police academy in Novi Sad.
“What was he doing in Kraljevo and is he really working for the police, or just studying to become one? We don’t know at this point. That all needs to be established,” Beocanin emphasized.
Local Front campaigns to expose corruption in the municipality. In 2016 it entered the Kraljevo town assembly after winning 6 per cent of the votes and so crossing the threshold.
Local Front gained wider recognition in January 2019 when its activists organised the “Ibar March”. The aim was to walk 150 kilometers from Kraljevo to Belgrade to join a protest marking the anniversary of the murder of Kosovo Serb opposition politician Oliver Ivanovic. The march was named after the Ibar river in Kosovo.
