SERBIA: A 14-year-old boy opened fire at a school in Belgrade, Serbia, on Wednesday morning, killing eight students and a security guard and wounding his teacher and six other children, Serbian police said.
The police said the shooting occurred around 8:40 a.m. local time (07:40 GMT) at Vladislav Ribnikar primary school in the central Vracar neighbourhood. Police officials in bulletproof vests and helmets cordoned off the area around the school shortly after the shooting and arrested the suspect in the schoolyard.
The suspect was a student at the school and was in the seventh grade. He was identified only by his initials, ‘k.k.’ and had fired multiple shots using his father’s handgun at the school, said the police.
District mayor Milan Nedeljkovic said that doctors were fighting to save the lives of the injured. Six students and a teacher were hospitalised after the shooting.
“I saw the security guard lying under the table. I saw two girls with blood on their shirts. They say he (the shooter) was quiet and a good pupil. He recently joined their class,” stated Milosevic, who rushed to the school shortly after the incident.
The father of one of the students at Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School in the Serbian capital, Milan Milosevic, said that his daughter was in the class where the gun was fired.
“She managed to escape. (The boy) …first shot the teacher, and then he started shooting randomly,” said Milosevic.
“I saw kids running out of the school, screaming. Parents came; they were in a panic. Later, I heard three shots,” a girl at an adjacent high school for Vladislav Ribnikar told state television RTS.
The motive behind the shooting is not immediately clear, and an investigation into the incident is underway. The acting director of the paediatric clinic in Belgrade, Sinisa Ducic, who is treating three of the injured, said that one of the victims, a girl, had a head injury and was awaiting surgery.
“She has a serious injury,” Ducic told journalists. Mass shootings are relatively uncommon in Serbia because of its tight gun restrictions and numerous amnesties for owners who turn in or register illegal firearms.
However, thousands of illegal weapons are proliferating in the western Balkans due to wars and unrest in the 1990s.
In the bloodiest shooting in Serbia since then, Ljubisa Bogdanovic killed 14 people in the central town of Velika Ivanca in 2013, while Nikola Radosavljevic killed nine and injured five in the eastern village of Jabukovac on July 27, 2007.
In 2015, Rade Sefer murdered six guests at his son’s wedding in the northern town of Senta, and a year later, Sinisa Zlatic shot and killed five people in a cafe in the similar north town of Zitiste. All of those attackers were adults.
Also Read: Texas Shooting: Gunman Kills Five, Including an 8-year-old Boy
