The shooting began Thursday evening near the town of Mladenovac when the attacker opened fire with automatic weapons from a moving car and then fled, state television RTS reported. Seven of the injured are in critical condition. Police searching for the suspect, believed to be a 21-year-old man, surrounded the area where he was believed to be hiding, the broadcaster reported. Helicopters and drones were seen flying over the area as officers searched the difficult terrain.
Interior Minister Bratislav Gašić called the attack a “terrorist act”. Aleksandar Vulin, director of the intelligence agency BIA, and Danica Grujičić, Minister of Health, reportedly visited the injured in hospital. According to Serbian media, a little later shooting took place in several villages around Mladenovac, first in the village of Dubona, then in Malo Orašje, then in Shepsin. Among the dead at Malo Orash were a policeman and his sister.
A 13-year-old schoolboy shot dead eight classmates and a security guard at a Belgrade primary school on Wednesday in an attack that rocked the Balkan country, the Guardian reported. Police say the attacker had been studying at the school since 2019. He used his father’s two pistols to shoot and may have been planning an attack for a month.
Belgrade police chief Veselin Milic said the teenager also had two firebombs and “made a list of children he planned to kill and their grades”. The shooter is too young to be prosecuted and will be committed to a psychiatric hospital. His parents are also arrested.
The second shooting took place as Serbia prepares for three days of mourning starting Friday morning. On Thursday, thousands of people lined up to lay flowers, light candles and leave toys outside the school in tribute to the victims of Wednesday’s attack.
Meanwhile, following a shooting on Wednesday at the elementary school named after Vladislav Rybnikari, seven people were also hospitalized – six children and a teacher. A girl, who was shot in the head, is in life-threatening condition and a boy is in serious condition with spinal injuries, doctors said Thursday.
Despite the fact that the country is full of weapons left over from the wars of the 1990s, mass shootings are still extremely rare – this is the first school shooting in Serbia’s modern history. The previous mass shooting took place in 2013, when a war veteran killed 13 people in the central Serbian village of Velika Ivanka, including family members and neighbours, AFP reported.
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