Zdravko Ponos was questioned by officers over his claim that Serbian authorities used a sonic weapon against protesters in March 2025.
Katarina Baletic
Officers from the Criminal Police Directorate questioned Zdravko Ponos, head of the opposition party Serbia Centre, SRCE, on Wednesday, over his claims that a sound cannon was used against anti-government protesters at a major rally in Belgrade on March 15 last year.
The Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office said the interview was conducted at the request of the Special Department for Combating High-Tech Crime of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office “to collect necessary information” about a post by Ponos on X, published on March 15, 2025.
“In that post, he was the first to claim that a ‘sound cannon’ had been used against citizens gathered at the end of the protest held earlier that day,” the prosecution noted. “The request to collect the necessary information was made for the purpose of determining whether there were grounds to suspect the criminal offence of causing panic and disorder,” it added.
In the X post, addressing the authorities, Ponos said: “You used a sound cannon. You fired at citizens while they were silently paying tribute to the victims of your regime. Man, you fired at people who were protesting peacefully.”
Shortly after the police interviewed Ponos on Wednesday, Dragan Vucicevic, editor of the pro-government tabloid Informer, read out information from the interview on a live TV programme.
“Ten minutes after the informational interview I was summoned to at the Criminal Police Directorate (UKP) had ended, Vucicevic was reading the official record of that interview on Informer,” Ponos noted on X.
The rally on March 15 2025 was the biggest protest ever organised in Serbia, gathering around 300,000 people, according to the NGO Archive of Public Gatherings. It was organised by students calling for accountability for the deaths of 16 people who died when the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapsed several months earlier. During a silent vigil, the crowd suddenly dispersed in a brief stampede.
Some of them later told BIRN that, just before the stampede started, they heard a noise that they variously described as “unnatural”, “like from a movie”, or like a jet plane. Others described a “kind of low howling sound”.
Similar testimonies, numbering over 2,800, collected by Serbian NGOs, also identified the sound as either like a vehicle, a plane or rocket, or like something from a natural disaster.
The Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation on June 19, under the suspicion that “simulation of the use of a ‘sound cannon’ was planned and carried out at the end of the protest on March 15, 2025, after which state authorities … were blamed for it by part of the public”.
In a statement, the prosecution wrote that it had ordered police to question the organisers and participatants in the March 15 protest, as well as those who publicly spoke about the “use” of a sound cannon and those who had allegedly “organised” protesters to seek medical aid following the incident.
After the investigation was launched, the prosecution raided the apartment of military analyst Aleksandar Radic and called for the questioning of the owner and editor of the news portal Srbin Info, D.Z.
A group of 14 prominent Serbian NGOs on June 23 meanwhile urged the Serbian authorities to ask the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to form an independent fact-finding mission into whether a sonic disturbance was used on March 15, 2025.
In the joint statement, they said that “the domestic judiciary has succumbed to political pressure and transformed the investigation into the political persecution of victims and those who supported them”.
