A shooting in Serbia left eight dead and 14 injured in Serbia, and the suspected perpetrator was arrested Friday morning after several hours of pursuit, a new bloody episode in a country already in shock from the killing, which had happened shortly before at a school had taken place.
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This new murder happened late Thursday evening in three villages near Mladenovac, some sixty kilometers south of Belgrade.
“After an extensive search, members of the Interior Ministry arrested UB, who was born in 2002, in the Kragujevac region in central Serbia,” the Interior Ministry said in a press release.
“He is suspected (…) of killing eight people and wounding fourteen others with an automatic weapon,” the same source said, saying all of the injured were hospitalized.
The Serbian state television (RTS) had reported thirteen injured in the morning.
According to RTS, the attacker first shot people gathered in the yard of a school in the village of Dubona, killing several people including an off-duty police officer and his sister.
He then shot people in two other villages, Malo Orasje and Sepsin, before fleeing.
According to media reports, the victims are mostly young people.
At sunrise on Friday, many police officers were traversing the area, flown over by a helicopter equipped with a searchlight, in search of the gunman, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.
Media reported that about 600 law enforcement officers were deployed, including members of a special counter-terrorism unit. The police blocked the access road to the villages.
Serbian Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic called the incident a “terrorist act”.
This new shooting took place the day after the shooting of eight children and a janitor at a school in Belgrade, a mass murder that deeply shocked the country.
Seven people – six students and a teacher – were also injured in the attack and two were still in critical condition as of Thursday after a series of surgeries.
national mourning
The suspected shooter, a 13-year-old schoolboy, was arrested shortly after the shooting in the schoolyard while he was waiting for police to arrive and taken to a psychiatric hospital.
The gunman’s father, a respected doctor and owner of the gun used, was arrested and is due to be heard by a prosecutor on Friday.
After this first murder, a three-day national mourning was ordered from Friday. Planned celebrations and events are largely cancelled. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic lamented “one of the most difficult days in contemporary Serbian history”.
Numerous firearms have circulated in the Balkans since the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the bloody wars of the 1990s.
About 765,000 weapons, including more than 232,000 pistols, are legally registered in Serbia, a country of around seven million people where shooting ranges are popular.
In April 2013, a villager shot dead 13 people, including family members and neighbors, near Mladenovac, in the same area where the shooting took place on Thursday evening.
A license is required to own firearms in Serbia. The Home Office on Thursday announced house checks to check that guns were being held in safes in accordance with current regulations.
Throughout Thursday, thousands of Belgraders laid flowers, toys, messages and lit candles in front of the Vladislav Ribnikar School in the city center where the slaughter took place.
Candlelight vigils are also held in Zagreb, Croatia and Banja Luka, Bosnia.
Masses for the victims were celebrated in the churches of Belgrade. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Porfirije, called the shooting “a catastrophe unprecedented in our nation and homeland.”