Seven and a half years after the worst bus crash in the country's recent history, justice for Laskarci is back at square one. The Supreme Court has overturned the final verdict for the tragedy of 13 February 2019, when a "Durmo Turs" bus carrying 55 passengers flew off the Skopje - Tetovo motorway and overturned. Sixteen people died. Around thirty were injured.

The decision was taken at a session of the Supreme Court's criminal panel on 9 September, composed of court president Afrim Fidani, rapporteur Džemali Saiti, Safet Kadrii, Cvetanka Perić and Mirjana Lazarova-Trajkovska. It also quashes the Skopje Basic Criminal Court verdict of 23 April 2025 and the Skopje Court of Appeal verdict of 15 May 2026. The case returns to first instance for a completely new trial.

The reasoning, for now, is a single sentence: there were procedural failures in the proceedings before the lower courts. The full decision has not yet been published.

What falls with the ruling

Everyone's sentence falls. "Durmo Turs" owner Durmiš Beluli and transport manager Remzi Miftari were originally sentenced to six and five years; then in May 2025, following an appeal by prosecutor Darko Jakimovski, the Court of Appeal raised both to ten years. Vehicle inspection station employees Igor Đorđievski and Goran Dukovski got seven years each, Jane Bovarovski stayed at five, and driver Manoil Trifunovski had been finally sentenced to 14 years.

Under the quashed verdict, Beluli and Miftari failed to observe safety regulations and allowed a mechanically unsound bus onto the road. The inspection station staff let that bus pass its test. The driver was found to have known about the faults and driven it anyway.

With the final verdict gone, the convicts have no legal basis to keep serving their sentences - they are released from prison until the retrial.

A trial that was already moving slowly

This is not a case that has only just gone off the rails. The first-instance proceedings dragged on for years, weighed down by extensive expert re-examinations. And some of the convicts spent months postponing their prison terms on medical grounds - Miftari fled the country in the meantime, Beluli began his sentence in Idrizovo prison.

Now even the little that was won is annulled. The families of the 16 people who did not come home that February will have to sit in the same courtroom again, hear the same expert findings again, and wait through another first instance.

Who answers for a flawed trial?

This is the key question, and nobody is rushing to ask it. If the Supreme Court found substantive failures in the work of the lower courts, somebody made those failures - a judge, a panel, a court service. The proceedings go back to zero, and nobody answers for the years lost getting there.

The same decision also sends the case against Stevčo Jakimovski back for retrial; he filed the request for extraordinary review through lawyer Viktor Cvetkovski from Kumanovo.

A legal system has the right to correct its own mistake - that is the point of it. But when the correction means the country's worst road tragedy starts over after seven years, the question is not whether the Supreme Court ruled correctly. The question is how the first and second instance ever produced a verdict that could not survive scrutiny.