Belgrade: At least eight people were killed and 10 others wounded in a shooting late Thursday in a town near Belgrade, the second such mass killing in Serbia in two days. RTS reported early Friday that the attacker used an automatic weapon to fire randomly at people near the town of Mladenovac, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of the capital. Reports said police were searching for a 21-year-old suspect who fled the scene after the attack.
No other details were immediately available, and police had not issued a statement. In Belgrade on Wednesday, a 13-year-old boy opened fire at a school with his father’s gun, killing eight of his classmates and a school guard. The bloodshed sent shockwaves through a Balkan nation that was unaccustomed to such mass killings.
Dozens of Serbian students, many dressed in black and carrying flowers, paid a silent tribute on Thursday to comrades killed the day before. Students filled the streets around the school in central Belgrade as they came from all over the city. Earlier on Wednesday, thousands of people lined up to lay flowers, light candles and leave toys in memory of the eight children and a school guard who were killed.
People cried and hugged outside the school in front of piles of flowers, tiny teddy bears and soccer balls. A gray and pink toy elephant was placed on the school fence with messages of condolence, and a girl’s ballet shoes hung from the fence.
The Balkan country is struggling to recover from what happened. Although littered with weapons left over from the wars of the 1990s, mass shootings are still extremely rare and this is the first school shooting in Serbia’s modern history.
The tragedy sparked a debate about the nation’s normalcy after decades of crises and conflicts that have resulted in deep political divisions as well as enduring insecurity and instability.
Authorities took steps to promote gun control on Thursday, as police urged citizens to lock up their guns and keep them safe away from children. Police have said that the teen used his father’s guns to carry out the attack. Police said Wednesday that he had planned it for a month, making sketches of classrooms and making lists of the children he planned to kill.
Police said Wednesday that the boy, who had accompanied his father to the shooting range and apparently had the code to his father’s safe, took two guns from the safe where they were kept along with bullets.
“The Interior Ministry is appealing to all gun owners to store their guns carefully, locked in safes or cupboards so that they are out of reach of others, especially children,” police said in a statement. in future.
Seven people were hospitalized in Wednesday morning’s shooting at the Vladislav Rybniker Elementary School, six children and a teacher. Doctors said Thursday morning that a girl was in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head and a boy was in critical condition with a spinal injury.
To help people deal with the tragedy, officials announced they were setting up a helpline. Hundreds of people answered a call to donate blood for the injured victims. The three-day mourning period will begin on Friday morning.
Serbian teachers’ unions announced protests and strikes to demand change and to warn of a crisis in the school system. Officials shirked responsibility, with some blaming Western influence rather than a deep social crisis in the country. The shooter, identified by police as Kosta Kekmanovic, has given no motive for his actions.
Upon entering his school, Kekmanovic first killed the guard and three students in the hallway. He then went to the history class where he shot the teacher before turning the gun on the students. Kekmanovic then unloaded the gun on the school grounds and called the police himself, although he had already received an alert from a school official. Police said that when he made the call, Kekmanovic told duty officers that he was a “psychopath who needed to calm down.”
Seven girls, a boy and the school’s security guard were among those killed. One of the girls was a French national, the French Foreign Ministry said. Authorities have said that Kekmanovic is too young to be charged and prosecuted. He is placed in a mental asylum while his father is taken into custody on suspicion of endangering public safety because his son has gotten hold of guns.
“I think we are all guilty. I think each of us has some responsibility, that we have allowed some things (shouldn’t have happened),” Belgrade resident Zoran Sefik said near the school on Wednesday evening. said during the vigil.
Jovan Lajovic, another Belgrade resident, said he was not surprised: “It is a matter of days when something like this could happen, taking into account what is happening here and there in the world,” he said.
Gun culture is widespread in Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans: the region tops Europe in the number of guns per capita. Cannons are often fired into the air in ceremonies and the cult of the warrior is part of the national identity. Nevertheless, the last mass shooting occurred in 2013 when a war veteran killed 13 people in a central Serbian village.
Experts have repeatedly warned about the danger posed by the number of weapons in a highly divided country like Serbia, where convicted war criminals are glorified and violence against minority groups often goes unreported.
They also noted that decades of instability stemming from the conflicts of the 1990s as well as ongoing economic hardship could trigger such outbreaks. “We have been suffering too much violence for too long,” psychologist Zarko Trebjesanin told N1 television. “Kids copy models. We need to eliminate negative models.