Mystery sound at Serbia protest sparks sonic weapon allegations
BELGRADE—Tamara Bojanovski was in a crowd of antigovernment protesters in Belgrade on March 15 when she heard a sound “like some powerful machine hurtling up from behind.”
Thousands of others heard it too; the crowd packed into one of the Serbian capital’s main boulevards parted abruptly, rushing to the sidewalks.
Stefan, a student, recalled a “rumble,” then a “whoosh” and a sensation of something speeding toward the crowd. Another student, Dragica, felt “a wave traveling through us.”
“People felt faint, and some fell over,” said lawyer Bozo Prelevic, a former joint interior minister.
The noise lasted only a few seconds. But speculation that a sonic weapon was used illegally to disperse the rally has filled headlines, talk shows and social media.
Biggest civil protest
President Aleksandar Vucic, already facing the biggest civil protests in decades, is under pressure to explain the incident.
Sonic weapons employ extreme sound to incapacitate targets. They can damage ears and cause headaches and nausea, and their use is illegal in Serbia.
Authorities denied possessing such devices, until interior minister Ivica Dacic admitted that police had bought Long-Range Acoustic Devices—used by authorities in the United States, Australia, Greece and Japan—from the United States in 2021.
Then Serbia’s police, BIA security and intelligence agency and military all denied ever using them in public.
‘Distinctive’
Vucic said on Saturday that Russia had sent experts from its FSB intelligence service to investigate at Belgrade’s request, and on Monday said American FBI investigators would also arrive within days. The US Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
The Omega Foundation, a human rights watchdog, said photos and witness accounts they reviewed and audiovisual footage obtained by Reuters were inconclusive, but suggested an LRAD could have been used.
“We really haven’t seen an effect like this. It was so distinctive,” said Omega Foundation researcher Neil Corney.
Earshot, a not-for-profit organization that specializes in audio investigations, which also saw the footage, said the noise could have come from a vortex ring gun, an experimental nonlethal weapon for crowd control that uses high-energy doughnut-shaped vortices of air or gas, but that more research was needed.
