The recent Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks demonstrate that the world is still vulnerable to rapidly spreading infectious diseases, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), warned on Saturday at the close of the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva.
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The Absurd Sexism of Euphoria’s Third Season
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When HBO’s Euphoria premiered in 2019, critics were equal parts entranced and horrified. Some praised creator Sam Levinson for his fresh take on the high-school drama genre, including its gritty portrayal of drug addiction; others questioned whether it was really necessary to hire 20-something actresses to play 16-year-olds, then repeatedly show their bare breasts onscreen (not an illegal creativechoice, per se, but certainly a questionable one).
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Lawmakers Demand Answers as CISA Tries to Contain Data Leak
Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.
On May 18, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a CISA contractor with administrative access to the agency’s code development platform had created a public GitHub profile called “Private-CISA” that included plaintext credentials to dozens of internal CISA systems. Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.
CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure. However, experts who reviewed the now-defunct Private-CISA archive said it was originally created in November 2025, and that it exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.
In a written statement, CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” But in a May 19 a letter (PDF) to CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said the credential leak raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches.
“This reporting raises serious concerns regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure,” Sen. Hassan wrote.
A May 19 letter from Sen. Margaret Hassan (D-NH) to the acting director of CISA demanded answers to a dozen questions about the breach.
Sen. Hassan noted that the incident occurred against the backdrop of major disruptions internally at CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed the senator’s concerns.
“We are concerned that this incident reflects a diminished security culture and/or an inability for CISA to adequately manage its contract support,” Thompson wrote in a May 19 letter to the acting CISA chief that was co-signed by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. “It’s no secret that our adversaries — like China, Russia, and Iran — seek to gain access to and persistence on federal networks. The files contained in the ‘Private-CISA’ repository provided the information, access, and roadmap to do just that.”
KrebsOnSecurity has learned that more a week after CISA was first notified of the data leak by the security firm GitGuardian, the agency is still working to invalidate and replace many of the exposed keys and secrets.
On May 20, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Dylan Ayrey, the creator of TruffleHog, an open-source tool for discovering private keys and other secrets buried in code hosted at GitHub and other public platforms. Ayrey said CISA still hadn’t invalidated an RSA private key exposed in the Private-CISA repo that granted access to a GitHub app which is owned by the CISA enterprise account and installed on the CISA-IT GitHub organization with full access to all code repositories.
“An attacker with this key can read source code from every repository in the CISA-IT organization, including private repos, register rogue self-hosted runners to hijack CI/CD pipelines and access repository secrets, and modify repository admin settings including branch protection rules, webhooks, and deploy keys,” Ayrey told KrebsOnSecurity. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it refers to a set of practices used to automate the building, testing and deployment of software.
KrebsOnSecurity notified CISA about Ayrey’s findings on May 20. Ayrey said CISA appears to have invalidated the exposed RSA private key sometime after that notification. But he noted that CISA still hasn’t rotated leaked credentials tied to other critical security technologies that are deployed across the agency’s technology portfolio (KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those technologies publicly for the time being).
CISA responded with a brief written statement in response to questions about Ayrey’s findings, saying “CISA is actively responding and coordinating with the appropriate parties and vendors to ensure any identified leaked credentials are rotated and rendered invalid and will continue to take appropriate steps to protect the security of our systems.”
Ayrey said his company Truffle Security monitors GitHub and a number of other code platforms for exposed keys, and attempts to alert affected accounts to the sensitive data exposure(s). They can do this easily on GitHub because the platform publishes a live feed which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories. But he said cybercriminal actors also monitor these public feeds, and are often quick to pounce on API or SSH keys that get inadvertently published in code commits.
The Private-CISA GitHub repo exposed dozens of plaintext credentials to important CISA GovCloud resources.
In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, the most egregious of which appears to have happened in late April 2025, Ayrey said.
“We monitor that firehose of data for keys, and we have tools to try to figure out whose they are,” he said. “We have evidence attackers monitor that firehose as well. Anyone monitoring GitHub events could be sitting on this information.”
James Wilson, the enterprise technology editor for the Risky Business security podcast, said organizations using GitHub to manage code projects can set top-down policies that prevent employees from disabling GitHub’s protections against publishing secret keys and credentials. But Wilson’s co-host Adam Boileau said it’s not clear that any technology could stop employees from opening their own personal GitHub account and using it to store sensitive and proprietary information.
“Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”
Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added statement from CISA.
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Ebola risk raised to ‘very high’ in DR Congo
The head of the UN health agency says the risk in the wider region is “high”, but it remains “low” at the global level. -
At the Mercy of Big Pharma
Just over a year ago, President
Last December, under the threat of tariffs, the United Kingdom agreed to an arrangement with the United States that claims to “deliver shared prosperity for American and British Citizens alike.” As part of the arrangement, the U.K. government agreed to increase the net price paid by its National Health Service for prospective new medicines by 25% as of April 2026. The arrangement also alters how the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence assesses new medicines and the prices it recommends the NHS pay. With the U.K. government’s commitment to double its spending on pharmaceuticals by 2036 under the arrangement, it is estimated by a leading health economist that the deal will cost Britain around 64 billion pounds (more than $86 billion). However, the biggest cost is the prediction that an additional 330,000 people in the U.K. could die by 2036 because of the deal drawing much needed money away from other parts of the NHS.
Despite the promises made by Trump and the window dressing that is Trump Rx, the president’s discount prescription drug initiative, prices are not and will not come down for Americans. The true beneficiaries of Trump’s most favored nation drug pricing efforts will be the pharmaceutical industry, which will now not only extract higher prices abroad but also keep American prices intact. Just like the Pfizers of the world began working with the U.S. government more than 40 years ago to expand global intellectual property and patent protections that resulted in the World Trade Organization and grew their monopoly power at home and abroad, Trump’s tariff threats are doing the same work.
The following shows why Trump’s plan, far from challenging the pharmaceutical industry’s power, is yet another illusion of access. It is drawn from “Pharma Monopoly: The Battle for the Future of Medicines,” written by myself and Rohit Malpani, and published next week by Polity Books.
— Tahir Amin
In October 2024, the American Cancer Society released a study that found more than one-third of fundraising stories on the GoFundMe crowd-funding platform in the United States related to experiences of medical financial hardships and health-related social needs. Out of crowdfunding campaigns examined, 91,113 of them were cancer-related. Just a few months later, the CEO of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, would be shot and killed in the middle of Manhattan on an early weekday morning. Despite the shocking and unjustified nature of the act, it led to an outpouring of online vitriol and anger directed at the healthcare industry. Many Americans shared their stories of how they had been denied coverage or left with bills that had caused distress and even the death of loved ones. The populist rage came from all sides of the political spectrum. Medical professionals also jumped in to express their disgust with the insurance system and how demoralizing it was to their profession. Although this dark episode related to an insurance company executive, there were concerns CEOs in other sectors with which the public were disgruntled could become targets.
Recent polling shows that one-quarter of American adults have difficulty affording their prescriptions. Thirty percent of the adults surveyed said they had not taken the medicine they were prescribed due to costs. This included adults either not filling their prescription, cutting their pills in half, or skipping a dose. Those most worried about affording their prescriptions were Black and Hispanic adults. Stories of Americans not being able to afford their medicine, going bankrupt, crossing the border to Mexico or Canada to buy cheaper insulin, or even dying are more common than one would think for one of the richest countries in the world. On average, Americans pay nearly three times more for their prescription drugs than people in 33 other high-income countries.
One-quarter of American adults have difficulty affording their prescriptions.
The access to medicines debate has largely focused on the Global South. This is understandable given it was the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the unaffordable prices of ARVs that would give birth to the access to medicines movement. Since then, the Global South has lurched from one public health emergency to another. Even so, a realization has set in that the high prices of medicines or misdirected R&D is not just affecting the Global South. It is also an issue for the Global North, especially the United States.
This tipping point probably came when Gilead Sciences, a Californian biopharmaceutical company, launched its hepatitis C cure, Sovaldi, in 2013. At roughly $1,000 per pill, or $84,000 for a single course of treatment lasting three months, it was met with alarm and anger in the United States and elsewhere. The pricing of the drug would cause a crisis in government and local state budgets in Europe and the United States, leading to rationing of the drug to those who had the most severe liver conditions. At one point, because of Gilead’s exorbitant pricing, it would have been cheaper for the US government to acquire the company than pay for the full course of treatment for all people living with hepatitis C in the United States. Such was the outcry that the US Senate Committee on Finance launched an investigation that found Gilead had pursued a business model to maximize revenue regardless of the human consequences. Senator Ron Wyden of the Democratic Party who co-led the investigation would capture what lay ahead when he said, “If Gilead’s approach to pricing is the future of how blockbuster drugs are launched, it will cost billions and billions of dollars to treat a fraction of patients.”
Examples of this kind of egregious pricing of medicines are now common in the West. It has led to a new wave of activism that recalls the efforts of HIV/AIDS activists at the turn of the century. In the United Kingdom, Boston-based biopharmaceutical company Vertex priced its patented cystic fibrosis drug, Orkambi, at £105,000 per patient per year. In the United States, the drug was listed at $272,000 (£207,000) and around $251,000 in Canada (£146,000). Vertex had not even bothered to register and sell Orkambi, or its later cystic fibrosis drug called Trikafta, at any price in a number of countries in the Global South, leaving families there with inadequate treatment or nothing. While Orkambi helped to extend and improve the outcomes of the lives of children and young adults with cystic fibrosis, it was not a cure. The UK National Health Service (NHS), which negotiates prices based on cost-effectiveness assessments, refused to pay the price Vertex had demanded. This led to a deadlock and the drug not being available to patients. Global campaigns were launched for the UK government to set aside Vertex’s patent so that cheaper generics could be made available. Campaigners even identified generic versions of the drug in Argentina that could be exported, because Vertex did not have a patent there. This campaign would also coordinate with groups in the Global South who were demanding that the drug be registered in their countries and that the manufacturing or import of low-cost generics be allowed. It was only after much public pressure and delay that Vertex and the NHS would agree on a price (which remains commercially confidential). Vertex maintained its position of power by not having its patents set aside, while the UK government saved some face by achieving a cost reduction, despite settling on a price that was still likely above what it felt it should pay. Even though availability of the medicine improved in the United Kingdom thanks to the unsung and courageous efforts of patient groups and activists, the fight continues for people in the rest of the world who are still unable to readily access the drug.
There are a number of key factors contributing to the differences in drug prices between countries in the Global North. One key difference is that the United States believes in a version of the free market where the government should not interfere in price setting. The market knows best and that applies also to essential goods, such as medicines. This explains, according to one study, how from 2008 to 2021 the launch prices for drugs categorized as new increased exponentially by 20% per year in the United States. For nearly half of these drugs, the initial price was above $150,000 per year. In contrast, many governments in the Global North negotiate with pharmaceutical companies the price they are willing to pay by employing a cost-effectiveness calculation, as highlighted in the case of Orkambi described above. Only recently has the United States started to catch up with the rest of the Global North countries by allowing its main government health agency to negotiate drug prices, although it is limited to the seniors’ market. This leaves the majority of Americans at the mercy of a private market where pharmaceutical companies hold most of the power.
The market knows best and that applies also to essential goods, such as medicines.
Despite the growing number of American drug pricing horror stories, the pharmaceutical industry and many politicians in the United States want its citizens to believe that their drug prices would be lower but for foreign freeloading. The Trump Administration has been more explicit about marrying lower drug prices in the United States to higher prices in other wealthy industrialized countries. Drug companies, and now the Trump Administration, contend that it is because of the price controls introduced by other nations that Americans foot the bill to ensure the R&D for the next generation of medicines. If it were not for these price controls, pharmaceutical companies would have higher revenues available to make larger investments and develop more pathbreaking medicines. A related argument is that, because of a lack of price controls and cost-effectiveness assessments of new drugs, Americans get access to newer medications sooner. As a result, this gives them greater freedom of choice compared to other wealthy countries. Many of these are narratives that were invented by the pharmaceutical industry in the late 1990s. Some were in response to a movement started by senior citizens against the high prices of essential prescription drugs. So persuasive were they that the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration put out a report making the industry’s arguments for them. Yet, the reality is very different. The pharmaceutical industry today is driven by financialized business models. These business models do not just determine what the next drug will be that a company will invest in and patent. They also funnel a significant chunk of profits extracted from Americans and patients around the world into the pockets of shareholders and executives through share buybacks and dividends.
The impact of neoliberal policies emanating from the United States over the past 40 years has armed the pharmaceutical industry with more power than it has ever held globally. With this monopoly power and political influence, it has constructed its own private empire that allows it to decide which medicines it develops, where it makes them available, and what prices it sets. Such unfettered power not only harms patients in the Global South but also hurts Americans and others in the Global North. As for the narrative that Americans have greater freedom of choice when it comes to the availability of medicines, the question that does not get asked enough is: what good is that freedom if you cannot afford to pay for it?
The post At the Mercy of Big Pharma appeared first on Truthdig.
UK scientists developing Ebola vaccine that could be ready for trials in months
The rare species of Ebola involved – known as Bundibugyo – kills around a third of those infected and has no proven vaccine yet.
Spanish Court Declines to Fine NordVPN Over LaLiga Piracy Blocking Order
In February, the Commercial Court No. 1 of Córdoba labeled VPN services as “technological intermediaries,” ordering them to actively block IP addresses that host illegal LaLiga matches.
The “dynamic” injunction specifically targeted NordVPN and ProtonVPN and it was granted without the companies being heard. In addition, there was no immediate right of appeal either.
Both VPN providers questioned the Spanish court’s jurisdiction, as they are both incorporated outside the EU. NordVPN called the approach unacceptable and warned of overblocking.
LaLiga, in its turn, pointed out that NordVPN failed to fully implement the Spanish interim order, and it asked the court to punish the VPN provider with fines.
Fines Rejected
According to NordVPN, the court declined this request. In a blog post published today, the company says the Córdoba judge dismissed LaLiga’s request for coercive fines, because it could not conclude that NordVPN had deliberately and without justification breached the February order.
The technical evidence that NordVPN presented in court relied on two points.
1. The flagged IP addresses changed frequently, often within hours, so the provided lists no longer matched the live addresses by the time blocking could take effect.
2. The blanket IP-level blocking demanded would have resulted in broad overblocking, rendering thousands of lawful websites inaccessible to users in Spain and beyond.
“What the ruling does is confirm something we said openly from day one — the technical concerns are real and evidenced, and a Spanish court has now recognized that,” the blog post reads.
The court’s findings, as described to TorrentFreak by NordVPN, are more measured. The company says the judge accepted its technical evidence as relevant to compliance but stopped short of ruling its experts right and LaLiga’s wrong, instead finding that the two reports deserved “the same consideration” while reaching “the opposite conclusion.”
For a closer look, TorrentFreak asked NordVPN for a copy of the order, but the company said it could not share it at this stage.
Update: Shortly after publication, LaLiga informed TorrentFreak that it couldn’t share a copy of the order either. The league confirms that the decision merely sets aside the coercive fines while the proceedings continue, stressing that it does not exempt NordVPN from implementing IP blocks where LaLiga can prove piracy is taking place.
Not the Final Word
By NordVPN’s own account, the decision is narrow. The company describes it as a procedural ruling at the preliminary stage, not a judgment on the merits. This means that the main proceedings are still ahead.
At the same time, the VPN provider also points out that there is broader opposition growing against the Spanish blocking effort, where overblocking affected legal sites and services at Cloudflare, Vercel, GitHub, Docker, and elsewhere.
“Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore,” NordVPN writes.
The friction has reached parliament. On April 29, a congressional committee passed a non-binding motion urging the government to reform Spain’s Digital Services Law, introducing a principle of “technological proportionality” to address and limit overblocking.
For now, however, the original February injunction remains in place and the underlying case continues. Whether the technical objections that NordVPN presented in court will also hold up when they are reviewed on the merits has yet to be seen.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Russian Woman with FSB Ties Claims CIA Cooperation
When Nomma Zarubina stood before a federal judge in New York to plead guilty to federal charges, the proceeding generated little public buzz. She admitted to lying to the FBI in 2021 about her connections to Russia’s top domestic security and counterintelligence agency, FSB, and to deceiving immigration authorities about her role in a New York-area prostitution ring.
But a transcript of that hearing, made public on the court docket this week, has peeled back the curtain on a far more bizarre geopolitical drama, revealing that Zarubina made a stunning claim to the judge: She was secretly passing information to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The revelation occurred when District Judge Laura Taylor Swain asked Zarubina if she had been confused when she lied to federal agents about her Russian intelligence connections. Zarubina replied that she was not confused, but rather terrified of the FBI agent handling her case, Neil Summers.
“He just scared me because, actually, I was responsible that moment before my initiative to pass information not to the FBI but to the CIA,” Zarubina told the court. After briefly conferring with her lawyer, she restated that she lied out of fear.
The CIA did not respond to requests for comment regarding Zarubina’s claims, and her court-appointed defense attorney, Kristoff Williams, declined to discuss the matter while the case remains active.
The sprawling federal case against Zarubina, who operated under the intelligence code name “Alyssa,” reads like a pulp espionage thriller. In April 2025, a grand jury added charges accusing her of transporting women across state lines for prostitution and lying on her United States citizenship application.
During the plea hearing, prosecutors outlined the extensive evidence they had prepared to present had the secretive operation gone to trial. Assistant U.S. Attorney Henry Ross detailed a two-pronged case. Prosecutors pointed to photographs from Zarubina’s social media accounts proving she attended an event at the specific direction of an FSB officer to secretly photograph the contact information of a journalist.
The government extracted evidence from her cell phone showing contact information for her FSB handler, as well as a photograph of an FSB epaulet sent to her by a second Russian intelligence officer.
To prove her involvement in the prostitution ring, prosecutors cited surveillance logs of Zarubina picking up women in Brooklyn and transporting them to a New Jersey massage parlor. The government also cited license plate reader data and testimony from law enforcement officers who conducted a raid on the parlor following an undercover sting operation.
Zarubina first drew the attention of federal investigators due to her self-reported work for Elena Branson, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen indicted in 2022 for acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Branson, who fled the United States before the charges were announced, operated the Russian Center New York and oversaw an “I Love Russia” campaign—an initiative that federal prosecutors described as a Kremlin-backed propaganda machine.
Despite the FSB ties, intelligence experts suggest Zarubina was likely a minor player. Paul Joyal, a former security chief for the Senate Intelligence Committee, described her as a likely “low-tier compatriot-network influence-recruit.” Given soft tasks like identifying journalists and mingling with policy wonks, Joyal noted that after her arrest, she was “abandoned without any visible extraction effort” by Moscow.
Her treatment stands in stark contrast to Maria Butina, another young Russian woman charged in 2018 with acting as an unregistered foreign agent. The Russian government elevated Butina to a national symbol; after her deportation, she became a television personality and was eventually elected to the Duma, Russia’s legislative body.
While she awaits sentencing on June 11—where she faces up to 10 years in prison—Zarubina has been sitting in a jail cell. Judge Swain revoked her bail last December after she engaged in an alcohol-fueled texting spree with an FBI agent, believed to be Summers. In additional texts introduced by prosecutors, Zarubina threatened to retaliate by revealing the names of prominent, VIP clients who frequented her New York-area prostitution ring.
She also faces likely deportation proceedings, a situation complicated by the fact that she has a young daughter born in the United States.
Despite the threats and her admissions of guilt, the February transcript reveals a defendant who felt deeply underappreciated by the American government she claims she was trying to assist—in part, she noted, because she opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Everything they have from my phone, and from me, actually, I volunteered,” Zarubina told the judge. “I was very persistent in communications with them, and I initiated five out of eight our meetings. So it was my initiative to share information with them, and they never appreciated that.”
EU Broadens Iran Sanctions Over Middle East Maritime Disruptions
The EU widened its sanctions regime against Iran to target individuals and entities involved in Tehran’s actions disrupting navigation in the Middle East, particularly in the Strait of Hormuz, the European Council said on Friday.
In its statement, The council said that the updated framework will allow the bloc to introduce restrictive measures, such as travel bans through EU territories and asset freezes, against those linked to Iran’s actions “threatening the freedom of navigation” in the region.
Under the new measures, EU citizens and businesses are prohibited from providing funds, financial assets, or economic resources to designated individuals or entities.
Serbian Police Chief Implicated in Deadly Mob Hit Cover-Up
The gruesome discovery outside Belgrade on Thursday was shocking enough on its own: a missing man’s remains found buried in a barrel. But it is the identity of the suspected accomplice that has plunged Serbia into a profound political and institutional crisis: the top police chief of the nation’s capital.
Veselin Milić, the recently ousted Chief of the Police Administration for the City of Belgrade, is now at the center of a sprawling criminal investigation into a brazen gangland murder and a highly coordinated cover-up. The discovery of the body in the town of Inđija brings a grim resolution to a week-long search for Aleksandar Nešović, who vanished following a May 12 shootout at a Belgrade restaurant.
As forensic teams conduct DNA testing to formally confirm the victim’s identity, the public’s attention has pivoted to the breathtaking involvement of one of the highest ranks of local law enforcement.
Prosecutors and local media accounts paint a chilling portrait of a police chief who allegedly used his ultimate authority to help lay a deadly trap.
According to the official prosecution timeline, Milić was already at a Belgrade restaurant on the night of May 12 with another man, Saša Vuković—former police officer—and an accomplice. Authorities allege that the police chief personally called Nešović to the venue under the guise of mediating a dispute.
Crucially, prosecutors say Milić explicitly advised Nešović—a man whom regional media has tied to a notoriously violent criminal syndicate known as “Keka’s group”—to leave his security detail behind.
During the ensuing argument, Vuković allegedly fired multiple rounds at Nešović with a pistol that had been illegally smuggled into the restaurant by Vuković’s wife. The gunfire killed Nešović and endangered other guests in the restaurant’s fireplace room.
What happened next, according to the media, transformed a mob hit into an unprecedented law enforcement scandal.
While the suspected shooter and his accomplice fled, media reports allege that Police Chief Milić stayed behind at the crime scene to systematically delete the restaurant’s surveillance footage. Other corrupt officers allegedly assisted in removing the body, which was ultimately found stuffed in the excavated barrel in Inđija.
The official investigation has revealed an extensive alleged conspiracy within the Belgrade police force. Prosecutors have confirmed they are investigating 10 individuals, including Milić, three other police officers, and three civilians.
Milić has been formally charged with failing to report a crime and assisting a perpetrator in evading justice. He was ordered held in a 30-day pretrial detention to prevent him from influencing witnesses or repeating the offense. On May 15, Serbia’s Interior Ministry officially announced he had been stripped of his position as Belgrade’s police chief.
The suspects in the shooting did not remain on the run for long. On May 14, authorities arrested Vuković and his suspected accomplice in a Belgrade suburb. A search of their getaway vehicle yielded passports and 10,000 euros in cash. They now face charges of aggravated murder.
In tandem with the homicide probe, prosecutors have launched a sweeping financial investigation into Vuković, ordering state agencies to scour his assets for evidence of money laundering.
The Belgrade Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office announced Thursday that it had ordered 70 expert forensic evaluations to piece together the full scope of the crime. Authorities have seized 10 vehicles, two dozen mobile phones, multiple computers, and hard drives.
The fallout from the scandal has severely rattled the Serbian government. Opposition leaders are demanding the immediate resignation of top officials, pointing to the police chief’s alleged involvement as proof of deep, systemic rot tying state authorities to organized crime.
Seeking to quell public outrage and counter media narratives of a delayed response, prosecutors emphasized that they were actively investigating the restaurant scene within hours of Nešović’s wife reporting him missing.
“Anyone involved in the murder or its concealment,” the prosecutor’s office vowed, “will face justice.”