They reported that the inmate, Uros B., 21, had been a “problem boy” since childhood. Authorities released a photo of the suspect in a police cruiser, showing a young man wearing a blue T-shirt with a Nazi salute code paired with Nazi symbols and a map of parts of Europe.
The attacker, who killed 8 and injured 14, was arrested on Friday morning near Kragujevac. The shooter fired automatic weapons at the inhabitants of several villages in the municipality of Mladenovac, about fifty kilometers south of Belgrade. Serbian Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic called the shooting a “terrorist act”, according to state media. Asked by reporters whether “Mladenovac’s killer” spoke about his motives during his interrogation, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said he only repeated one word – “humiliation”.
Urosh B., from the village of Donya Dubona, grew up an unsociable and reserved boy, and took out his anger on those around him. Witnesses told RTS that on Thursday the suspect argued in front of the school building with a local resident, a policeman of his age, believing he had “humiliated and insulted”, returned home and is came back with a submachine gun. He shot the young man with his sister, then shot the people who were sitting on the bench talking.
“I heard noises – good, good, good,” – said Milan Prokic, a resident of Dubona, located near Mladenovac. According to Prokic, he first thought that people were shooting to celebrate the birth of a child, as is the custom in Serbia. “The first machine gun shot was heard. A minute or two later, shots were heard again, about 15 bullets,” another Dubona resident said. Another resident of this village said that she locked herself in the house and heard crying.
Officers from the Kragujevac Emergency Situations Sector seized four hand grenades from the house in the village of Vinishtu, where the killer was hiding. The cold-blooded shootings shocked the Balkan nation, which is still grieving following the mass shooting the day before. More than 600 special forces were looking for the attacker, a TV station reporter said from the scene, actively combing the area. The assailant was searched using helicopters from the Ministry of the Interior and thermal imaging cameras.
The second shooting occurred on Thursday, the day after a 13-year-old boy used his father’s gun to kill eight classmates and a security guard at a Belgrade school. On the same day, authorities moved to tighten gun control as police urged citizens to lock up their guns and keep them away from children. The government has imposed a two-year moratorium on handguns and increased penalties for those who allow minors to own guns.
The bloodshed shocked the Balkan nation, bruised by wars but unaccustomed to massacres. Although Serbia is full of weapons left over from the wars of the 1990s, Wednesday’s school shooting was the first in the country’s modern history, AP reported. The last mass shooting before this week was in 2013, when a war veteran killed 13 people in a village in central Serbia.
Gun ownership is common in Serbia and other Balkan countries: the country has one of the highest per capita gun rates in the world. And at festivals in the region, they often shoot in the air. Experts have repeatedly warned of the danger posed by large numbers of weapons in Serbia, noting that potential outbursts of violence could be caused by decades of instability caused by the conflicts of the 1990s, as well as by persistent economic difficulties.
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