Durmish Beluli, owner of the Durmo Tours company whose bus was involved in the major 2019 accident on the Skopje – Tetovo highway which killed 16 passengers and injured 37, tried to lay the blame entirely on the driver.

Beluli is charged along with the driver Manoel Trifunovski and technicians from his company, which also did the mandatory safety testing of the bus. Besides the issue with checking his own vehicles, Beluli is charged with allowing the buses to be rigged with a device that tampers with the speed measurement. But he insists that the blame is on Trifunovski, and not on him, as company owner.

Every professional driver must check his vehicle before heading out on the road, Beluli said. “I regret the accident. Whatever we do now the dead won’t return. I call on the only participant in the accident – the driver – to say what happened. Only he knows the truth”, Beluli added.

He also insisted that he never asked his technicians to give passing grades to the safety of his own vehicles and that he didn’t know the bus had a tampering device, again blaming the driver.