Sound cannon case: prosecutors cite targeting, Ponos hits back

Belgrade’s Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office interviewed Zdravko Ponos, leader of the Serbia Center movement, on Tuesday, July 1, over his post on the social network X from March 15, 2025, about the alleged use of a so called sound cannon at a protest. Rather than easing tensions, the session at the Criminal Police Directorate opened a fresh front between the prosecution and part of the opposition.

The same day, the office announced that public targeting of the acting prosecutor was impermissible and amounted to undue influence on the work of the judiciary. It asked the High Prosecutorial Council, the body charged with protecting the independence of prosecutors, to respond. The message was blunt: pressure on a prosecutor through social media must not pass without an institutional answer.

Ponos, for his part, described the whole procedure as an attempt at intimidation. He raised a question now echoing across the public sphere, namely what targeting even means if the name of the prosecutor who ordered him summoned had already been made public. The acting prosecutor, Vladimir Zivkovic, had been named earlier, so the Serbia Center leader argues the targeting charge rests on shaky ground.

Prosecutors ask the council to step in

The core of the prosecution’s message is protection of the judiciary from pressure. The office said an individual who publicly names and shames a prosecutor, by name and by office, crosses the line of permissible criticism and enters the zone of undue influence. The ball was therefore passed to the High Prosecutorial Council, which is expected to assess whether the officeholder’s independence is at risk and whether protection is warranted.

The context makes the dispute more delicate. State bodies had previously denied that a sound cannon, a device that can spread panic in a crowd through high intensity sound waves, was used at the protest. Ponos’s post from March last year claimed the opposite, so the interview now turns on a statement more than a year old. Law professor Violeta Besirevic assessed the launch of proceedings as an attempt to discredit a political rival rather than a routine check of the claims.

For editors, two layers must be kept apart. The first is legal, whether the post crossed the boundary of free speech. The second is political, since an opposition leader ended up before the criminal police over a claim made during a protest. Those two layers overlap, and that is where the conflict lives.

Who leaked the record to the public?

Ponos went a step further and put a direct question to Nenad Stefanovic, the chief prosecutor of the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office. He demanded an explanation of how the police record of his interview reached the daily Informer, where, he says, it was published first, before it reached the wider public. If a document from the file leaked to a single outlet, the Serbia Center leader asks, then who is really being targeted and who is breaking the rules of procedure?

The question is more than rhetorical. A leak from an active case file raises the issue of accountability inside the system itself, because such a document should not leave the file before its time. As of the writing of this piece, the prosecution had not commented on that specific allegation, so it remains open whether the chief prosecutor will offer an explanation or leave the answer to the council.

In the end, we are left with two opposing accounts of the same event, one about protecting the judiciary and another about pressure on a dissenting voice. Who will you believe, the prosecutors seeking to shield their colleague or the opposition figure asking how the record ended up in a newspaper?