Original article (in Serbian) was published on 9/9/2025; Author: Marija Vučić
“A Drunk Pakistani Hijacked a Bus in Niš and Headed Toward Pakistan,” reads a viral Instagram post published on September 4 on the page Deportacija (eng. Deportation). There is no official confirmation from the police that such an incident took place, nor are there any media reports, but this is not the only suspicious or false post on Deportacija. The page gains hundreds of new followers every day thanks to disinformation and sensationalist posts about migrants, portraying them as a dangerous group of rapists, murderers, thieves, and terrorists who will enslave the Western Christian world.
Nearly 14,000 people have so far liked the disputed claim about the alleged Pakistani:
“Last night in Niš, an unusual incident occurred when, according to unofficial information, an intoxicated Pakistani citizen pulled the driver out of a city bus and took control of the vehicle. Eyewitnesses claim that the man then headed in the direction of Pantelej (a city municipality in Niš, author’s note), insisting that he was on his way to Pakistan,” the post reads, adding that the police allegedly “reacted quickly.”
The police did not respond to our question about whether these “unofficial reports” are true. No official statement has been issued about this alleged incident, and such an “extraordinary event” would almost certainly have been reported in the media. However, there is no news about it. It also remains unclear who the supposed eyewitnesses are and to whom they allegedly gave the statements paraphrased in the post.
Thanks to this viral and dubious claim, the page began to grow rapidly, rising from around 3,000 followers—when we first noticed it over the weekend—to about 5,300 followers at the time of writing. The page was launched in March this year.
Other posts are less viral but generally just as questionable or almost certainly false.
For example, in a post published the following day, which gained nearly 900 likes, it was claimed that a woman had been killed in the U.S. subway and that the perpetrator was “according to unofficial sources, a migrant.”
However, this is not true. The incident did occur on August 22 in the U.S. state of North Carolina, but the suspect in the murder is an American citizen, Dekarlos Brown Jr.—a man with a criminal record, years of imprisonment in the United States, and a diagnosed psychiatric condition.
In another post published in recent days, it was claimed that “migrants and leftists set fire to a church in Canada,” accompanied by a video of a burning church.
“Many claim that migrants and leftists are behind the fire,” the post reads. “Is this a coincidence or a planned attack on faith and tradition?”
It is not known who these “many” are, since no migrants have been accused in connection with the fire at the Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Allégresses church in Quebec, Canada. The church burned down in October last year, and it is speculated that the fire was part of a broader “campaign” in which dozens of churches across Canada have been set ablaze since 2021. In most cases, the perpetrators remain unidentified, and the motive is believed to be retaliation by Indigenous communities against the Catholic Church.
These and similar posts appear to strongly engage followers, who leave comments filled with hatred toward migrants, calling for protests against them and demanding their deportation from Serbia and Europe.
“Immediate beatings and across the border, otherwise we’ll be giving birth to little blacks and Muslims and we’ll cease to exist,” reads just one of many similar comments.
There are also completely bizarre claims, such as one suggesting that in a video a “fake asylum seeker (migrant) is cooking a cat for lunch in the middle of the street,” while other viral posts focus on foreign nationals receiving work permits in Serbia. Although many people do in fact obtain work permits, this page singles out only workers with darker skin.
Serbia issues tens of thousands of work permits to foreign nationals every year. According to data from the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration of the Republic of Serbia, by the end of 2024 around 50,000 foreigners held work permits that allowed them to live in the country. The largest groups were citizens of Russia (21,535), China (9,653), followed by India (4,460) and Turkey (4,018).
The number of work permits issued in Serbia has been rising significantly each year, and there is a growing presence of foreign nationals working as city bus drivers, construction workers, food delivery couriers, and in similar jobs.
Anti-migrant content in Serbia began to expand in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when the migrant crisis was at its peak and large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa were moving toward Western and Northern Europe, often through the Balkans.
At that time, the page Stop the Settlement of Migrants gained particular popularity, quickly amassing more than 100,000 followers. It operated in the same way: publishing disinformation, unverified and unverifiable claims about migrant attacks on local residents, as well as outdated, recycled news about incidents involving migrants. Further details on that case can be found here.
Translated in English using AI tools, then thoughtfully refined by a human editor.
