Police at a Niš TV Station a Day After a Vučić Interview: Editor's 19-Year-Old Son Detained, No Official Explanation

A day after he conducted an interview with Aleksandar Vučić, Bojan Avramović, editor of a local TV station in Niš, got a visit from the police. On 30 October officers came to the station and took away his 19-year-old son Luka, who worked there, and then, the father says, searched his flat too.

What follows is a familiar Balkan version of events: two stories, not one document. The father claims they showed no warrant and that nobody explained why they were taking the boy, and they could have, he says, just called him on the phone. Luka, according to him, had already been questioned on election day, because police found the device the station uses to broadcast live strange and thought he was holding a gun.

Vučić tells it differently: there was a warrant, issued by a municipal public prosecutor, and in the house they counted money "dinar by dinar" and found 80,000 dinars. Police, he says, couldn't tell a tripod and camera from a machine gun. So one says he saw no warrant, the other knows whose warrant it was. We were unable to find any official explanation from the police or prosecutors.

If a 19-year-old was taken away over a tripod, someone has to say so out loud and sign their name to it. If it's something else, likewise.

Media freedom is not a reward for good behaviour

Avramović is no neutral figure. In June 2025 the Media and Reform Centre from Niš filed a criminal complaint against him after he called journalists fascists on a live programme, and the organisation claimed the station was broadcasting without a licence from the regulator. None of that gives police the right to walk into a newsroom without explanation. Media freedom also applies to those you don't like. Otherwise it isn't freedom.

The most awkward question is another one. Vučić calls this terror by the students who beat him, yet the students don't have a single minister: the new parliament hasn't been constituted and there's no government. So who sent the police? Vučić himself gives an answer that doesn't help him: he says the state essentially doesn't exist and that everyone does what they want to curry favour with the new people. How fast does a uniform change sides in the Balkans?