No Suspect Found in Novi Sad Student Attack, Students Say
Students in blockade say the attack on a student in Novi Sad remains unsolved four days later, that building camera footage has not been reviewed, and that the case is being treated as robbery.
The attack on a student in Novi Sad, which the students in blockade movement made public on August 11, has still not led to a suspect four days after it happened. The victim is a student at the Faculty of Medicine in Novi Sad, attacked inside the building where she lives. According to the students’ statement, the assault happened in the elevator, as she was on her way up to her apartment.
The statement says the student let an unknown man in through the building’s front door, and that he then got into the elevator with her. That is where the attack started.
“They got into the elevator together, and then the man started choking her. She nearly lost consciousness. The attack lasted the whole ride up. When he stopped, he grabbed her phone and ran,” the students in blockade wrote in their statement.
The elevator passed six floors, and the choking, according to the account, lasted the entire ride. The student was on the verge of blacking out but kept fighting back until the end. The attacker then stopped choking her, took her phone and left the building. The students also note that he walked in without a mask, even though the building has video surveillance.
Phone traced through an app, police did not enter the address
According to the statement, the stolen phone was located through a tracking app, and the location was passed on to police the same night. Nobody went to the address the app pointed to. The explanation the students say they were given was that police “cannot enter a random house” at night.
The building where the student was attacked has cameras, so the footage should show the face of the man who followed her in. That footage, however, still has not been reviewed. The students say the review keeps getting pushed back and that the building manager is unreachable, leaving the one piece of material that could identify the attacker unused four days later.
“Four days later, the man who choked our classmate still has not been found. The camera footage keeps getting delayed, the building manager will not answer, and the responsibility keeps getting passed around,” the statement reads.
Why is the case being treated as robbery?
Students say they have asked police that question and had not received an answer by the time they published their statement. They say an inspector told the student it was not an ordinary theft and that the attacker had worse intentions in mind, yet the case, as it was explained to them, is still being handled as robbery.
For the students, that is the heart of the whole statement. They are not arguing the legal fine points of how the crime should be classified. They are raising a question of accountability: if the investigator’s own reading of events is what they say it is, it does not match the label the case has been filed under.
“We will not stay silent while women are choked in elevators and institutions look for excuses. We will not accept a state where victims are left alone while attackers walk free. For justice or for negligence? For victims or for criminals? For Serbia or for the mafia?” the students in blockade asked.
The tone is openly political, and the statement does not hide that. This time, the student movement in blockade is not talking about universities or protest demands. It is talking about one criminal case and how it was handled in its first four days.
Police have not commented
Neither the police nor the Interior Ministry had publicly given their account of events by the time the statement was published. Several specific claims remain neither confirmed nor denied:
- that the stolen phone’s location was passed to police that same night
- that officers declined to enter the address the app pointed to
- how the case has been classified and who is handling it
For now, the entire account of what happened rests on one side of the story. Everything known so far comes from the statement by students in blockade, which relays what the student told them and what she says she heard from the inspector.
Three things remain open: when the building’s camera footage will be reviewed, whether the address from the app was checked after that night, and under what classification the case currently stands. Only the police can answer any of those three questions, and four days after the attack, they still have not.
