Professor of the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Belgrade, Milan Spremić, was released from custody in which he spent more than 200 days due to an investigation related to by the fall of the canopy at the train station in Novi Sad. However, Spremic remains under house arrest.
This information was shared on social networks by his colleague, professor Sanja Fritz.
"After almost 208 days spent in custody, our colleague and friend Milan Spremić finally returned home. Thank you to everyone who spoke about this case and pointed out its absurdity and injustice," said Fritz.
Spremic was arrested on November 23, 2024. as one of the suspects in the case of the canopy collapse at the newly built station in Novi Sad, in which 16 people lost their lives.
The identities of those detained were not known to the public at first, but the Faculty of Civil Engineering later, on December 5, confirmed that Spremic was among those arrested. In the statement of the faculty, it was pointed out that he was not responsible for the tragedy, since he was engaged only in the expert control of the conceptual project, which did not include the execution of works on the disputed canopy.
The teaching staff of the faculty has repeatedly publicly expressed doubts about the validity of his detention, stressing that it is an unfair and unjustified procedure.
Who is Professor Milan Spremić?
Professor Milan Spremić is an associate professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Belgrade, a specialist in metal structures.
He was engaged as a reporter of the Republic Audit Commission in charge of the expert control of the conceptual design of the construction for the railway station in Novi Sad. It is the earliest stage in the project documentation and does not include the execution of works on the field itself.
What is Professor Spremić charged with?
According to the order on the investigation, Milan Spremić, a professor at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Belgrade, was responsible for the design of the Republican Audit Commission and the technical control officer of the construction, reconstruction and adaptation project of the station building created by Slobodan Naumović.
The prosecutor believes that Spremić failed to determine that in the conceptual project "the scope and type of necessary previous research that will be the basis for the development of the reconstruction project was not assessed, and that the technical properties of the existing structure were not determined, as well as that there is a lack of a recording of the state of the existing structure."
In the translation, Spremić is criticized for not pointing out that it is necessary to take a picture of the state of the station building in order to know precisely what the stability of the entire building is.
As the media previously announced, the planners did not have an original project of the station building, which is why it was necessary to make a video, but this was allegedly not done.
The prosecutor also believes that Spremic did not check whether the project contained all the materials and data and whether the project ensured the fulfillment of the basic requirements for the building in question. This should ensure that the building as a whole and its special parts are suitable for the intended use, writes Forbes Serbia.
The prosecutor also claims that he did not issue any measures or make any objections in order to eliminate the deficiencies, but that he prepared a report on the expert control of Naumović's project, which did not contain any measures. It was then submitted to the Railway Infrastructure of Serbia in order to further implement the project. In this way, according to the prosecutor, he failed to establish that there was corrosion at the connection of the tensioner and the roof support.
