Novi Sad Necklace Thief, 19, Arrested After Injuring Officer

Police in Novi Sad have solved nine aggravated thefts and arrested S. R. (born 2007), from the area around Novi Sad. The announcement came on August 6, 2026, with police handling the case together with the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Novi Sad. The suspect also faces a charge of assault on an official performing official duties, after he kicked a police officer during the arrest.

According to the suspicion, he tore gold necklaces off his victims’ necks, approaching them from behind. The nineteen year old is believed to have been operating this way for a month.

Approaching from behind, on the street and in building entrances

The scenes followed the same pattern: streets and entrances of residential buildings across Novi Sad. The suspect would come up behind a woman, at a moment when she could not see him, and rip the chain from her neck. The attack lasts a second or two, so the victim typically has no description of the attacker.

Nine offenses in a month works out to just over two attacks a week. This falls under the qualified form of theft, since the legal classification of aggravated theft looks not only at the value of what was taken but also at how the act was carried out.

Officer suffered serious bodily injury

The arrest did not go without incident. The suspect tried to flee and, in doing so, kicked a police officer, who suffered serious bodily injury. That is not treated as an aggravating circumstance of the theft but as a separate criminal offense: assault on an official performing official duties.

Criminal charges against the suspect will be filed with the competent public prosecutor’s office through the regular procedure. Until a final verdict, he remains a suspect, and everything stated here rests at the level of the grounds for suspicion presented by police.

Why was he sent straight to Krusevac?

The suspect was not held in Novi Sad’s detention facility. He was sent to the Juvenile Correctional Facility in Krusevac, to serve a previously imposed sentence. That is an institution where measures and sentences handed down to juvenile offenders are carried out, so the reference to an earlier sentence indicates it was imposed while he was still a minor.

That detail is the most important part of the entire statement. This is not someone’s first contact with the justice system, but a person who had already gone through a final court judgment and an obligation he failed to serve out in full. Going by that timeline, the string of nine thefts ran in parallel with a sentence he had not completed.

A string of property crimes across Backa

Novi Sad and the surrounding area have made several appearances in police statements this summer over serial property crimes. We previously reported on six car thefts across Backa and the arrest of two suspects, following the same pattern: multiple reports that only later get linked into a single case.

That kind of work, where individual reports are matched up into a series, is usually what leads to a case being solved. A victim who lost a chain weighing a few grams of gold does not get an investigative team of her own. Nine such reports do.

Police did not say whether the stolen gold jewelry was recovered, nor what the total material damage amounts to.