While SNS flags were flying in the packed Sava Center on December 25, and thunderous applause from the gathered students accompanied the speech of the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, one student was unwelcome. His trace disappears from the Sava center for six hours, along with the signal of his phone, it says BIRN.
Vedran (as the text called the 23-year-old activist and student of Union University, whose real identity is known to BIRN) entered the hall of the Sava Center out of pure curiosity, together with a friend, also a student and activist. At the entrance, he handed over the vuvuzela, sat in a nearby row and started a conversation with the participants of the meeting.
"Next to me was a couple from Aleksinac who confirmed to me that they were paid to come there," Vedran told BIRN.
After fifteen minutes he got up to get a drink for himself and his friend. He did not have time to return - he was surrounded by a group of men in civilian clothes.
Vedran was taken to the Savski Venac police station, where he spent the next six hours locked up in a room with four inspectors. Upon entering the station, his phone was taken from him.
The phone was taken to one of the neighboring rooms, where data about Vedran's private life - who he was seeing, where he stayed, what his ambitions were - were "sucked" via a USB cable connected to his device. All this was done without any legal basis.
Having "cracked" the code on Vedran's phone and downloaded all the data using Israel's Cellebrite digital forensics equipment, the operatives tried to erase the traces. This was shown by the phone analysis conducted in January 2025 by experts of the cyber laboratory of the international human rights organization Amnesty International.
In addition, Amnesty International experts noted that the service tried several times and in different ways to install an unknown Android application on his Samsung. This method of forcibly unlocking the phone using Cellebrite equipment, followed by the insertion of the NoviSpy tracking software, has also been noted in previous cases where the BIA was proven to be spying on activists, as reported by BIRN.
Going to the Sava Center
Vedran told BIRN journalists about his unpleasant experience with the secret service, which began when he was surrounded by a group of unknown men inside the Sava Center.
"They asked me who I am, what I am, who sent me." They asked me to show them the phone, which I did not allow. They took me to the ground floor of the Sava Center and placed me in a room. They kept pressuring me to hand over the phone to them, but I refused. I asked them to show me their IDs and asked why I was there and who they were," says Vedran.
He believes that the members of the security structures singled him out because he seemed younger compared to the other participants in the rally, but he does not rule out the possibility that he was "betrayed" by the vuvuzela he handed over to the security at the entrance to the Sava Center - the same one he brought from the protest earlier that day.
"Then they dragged me out of the room and took me to the car - one of them held me by one hand, the other by the other." When we got to the vehicle, I refused to get in. I didn't know where they were taking me, whose car I was getting into, what was happening... But I had no choice - they pushed me inside. Basically, that ride was the worst part of it all. Some people put you in a car and start driving in an unknown direction. That's when I thought I was saying goodbye to life."
Read the entire text on the website BIRN-and.
