Novi Sad police officer arrested over MUP data leak
An anti-corruption unit in Novi Sad detained a police officer and 11 other people over the alleged misuse of the interior ministry database across nearly three years.
- A total of 12 people were detained, among them a police officer, Z. D., from Novi Sad.
- He is suspected of accessing the interior ministry database between December 2022 and November 2025 and passing records to criminal groups.
- He faces a charge of abuse of office; the other 11 people are accused of inducing the certification of false content.
- The officer has been ordered held for up to 48 hours.
The Special Anti-Corruption Department of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad has detained a police officer and eleven other people. The operation was carried out on the prosecutor’s orders, and at the center of the investigation is the alleged misuse of the database of the Ministry of the Interior that, prosecutors suspect, lasted almost three years.
The police officer is identified in the investigation only by the initials Z. D. According to prosecutors, he faces a charge of abuse of office. The other eleven people are suspected of inducing the certification of false content, which points to a chain that, in the view of investigators, served to produce forged documents.
Prosecutors say that between December 2022 and November 2025 Z. D. accessed data held in the interior ministry’s Unified Information System. He is suspected of reaching those records through the authorizations he held as an employee, and then making them available to people outside the system. A span of nearly three years suggests that, if the claims are confirmed, this was not an isolated incident but a longer pattern of conduct.
Who allegedly received the database records?
According to the prosecution, the data is suspected to have ended up with foreign nationals charged with the most serious crimes and with leaders of criminal groups. That shifts the investigation from the question of a single employee to the question of a wider network that, prosecutors allege, had an interest in obtaining the internal records of a state body.
Prosecutors further suspect that Z. D. enabled the acquisition of false identities. He is said to have created the conditions for issuing forged Serbian biometric documents, which would help people in hiding or under investigation abroad to move and to conceal their real identity. For that reason the case is being treated as a security matter, not merely as a disciplinary breach inside the police.
The officer, Z. D., has been ordered held for up to 48 hours. The others detained will be questioned as the proceedings continue. At this stage these are suspicions and prosecutors’ claims, not legally established facts, so the presumption of innocence applies until any indictment is confirmed and the court rules.
What does a case like this reveal about database protection?
The interior ministry’s Unified Information System holds sensitive data about citizens, from identity documents to records that touch on security. The suspicion that one employee was able to access and pass on that data for years raises the question of how closely it is tracked who opens a given file, when, and why.
If it reaches an indictment, the investigation will have to show how the data left the system and how much of it was used to make false documents. For now prosecutors are building the case on the evidence gathered and the questioning of those detained.
How much trust can citizens place in the protection of their own data when the leak is suspected to come from the inside?
