Stevan Filipovic Wants Phone Location on the Record
Director and professor Stevan Filipovic published the path of his stolen phone: the Interior Ministry on Majke Jevrosime, a park near Dunavska, forensics on Kneza Milosa, then Urosevac.
Film director and Faculty of Dramatic Arts professor Stevan Filipovic laid out, on August 8, the timeline of how the mobile phone attackers took from him three days earlier in downtown Belgrade moved around, and demanded that police and prosecutors explain how a device his tracking app first placed inside the Interior Ministry (MUP) building on Majke Jevrosime Street ended up in Urosevac, in southern Kosovo.
The attack happened on Wednesday, August 5, at the corner of Makedonska and Nusiceva streets. Filipovic was photographing people spray painting a protected building, people he later described as supporters and members of the ruling party. One of them grabbed his phone first, and then, as he described it, five more people arrived, knocked him to the ground, and beat him with their feet and a metal chair.
“Criminals working for the regime no longer have a problem beating a man in front of 15 witnesses and several security cameras,” Filipovic said.
Four locations in three days
Filipovic wiped his device’s content remotely but kept the ability to track it through the Find My app. What the app then showed him, he published publicly, along with screenshots of the geolocation. The sequence ran as follows:
- the Interior Ministry building on Majke Jevrosime Street
- a park near Dunavska Street, a spot where hooligans gather
- the MUP forensics unit on Kneza Milosa Street
- Urosevac, ten hours after the previous location
He didn’t stop at the first address. He went to that police station and asked that his reading be entered into the record.
“I first located it at the Interior Ministry on Majke Jevrosime. Then I went there and told them I wanted it on the record that I’d used the Find My app and found that the phone was physically there,” Filipovic said.
Police, he said, accepted the statement in writing but dismissed it in conversation. “They put it in the record, but they said it definitely wasn’t there,” he said.
“Afterward it was at the MUP forensics unit on Kneza Milosa. Ten hours later, the new location is Urosevac,” Filipovic said.
Why does the record entry matter here?
Because from that moment the geolocation stops being a social media post and becomes part of the case file. What’s written in the record, the prosecution must either confirm or refute, and do so with reasons, while an Instagram post obligates no one.
The address an app displays isn’t proof on its own. It shows a device’s last known position, with a margin of error that in dense urban blocks can span into neighboring buildings, so a pin over one address doesn’t mean the phone sat in that exact room. That’s exactly why the check is simple: the device carries its own serial number, and the carrier keeps records of where it registered.
Two outcomes follow from what’s been published, and each carries its own obligation. If the phone really did cross into southern Kosovo, Serbian police cannot retrieve it through their own action, since they don’t operate independently in that territory, so the case shifts onto the slower track of international legal assistance. If it wasn’t there, the question stands: what did the app display for three days, and why did its first reading match the address of a police station.
What the prosecution and the president said
The First Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade opened a case over the attack, as Srpske Vesti already reported. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic condemned the attack and called on the relevant institutions to prosecute and punish those responsible, with a caveat he added himself, “if it’s true that Filipovic was attacked.”
That caveat and Filipovic’s claim that the attack happened in front of 15 witnesses and several security cameras stand opposite each other as the measure for everything that follows. Footage from the cameras at the corner of Makedonska and Nusiceva either exists or it doesn’t, and the answer to that is a matter of days, not interpretation. Until then, the case file holds one record into which the victim himself asked for a line stating that his stolen phone is located inside a police building.
