Serbia school shooting: Teenager kills 9 in Belgrade classroom
A 14-year-old boy has opened fire in his classroom in Belgrade, shooting dead eight students and a security guard and wounding seven other people in a pre-planned attack.
Serbian police said the boy first shot the guard and three girls in the corridor using his father's handgun on Wednesday morning. He then entered the history class and shot at the teacher and his classmates.
A seventh-grader was arrested after calling police and admitting to the schoolyard shooting, police said.
Belgrade police chief Veselin Milic said the attacker had two guns and two petrol bombs and had planned everything in advance.
He told a press conference the boy already had the names of the children he wanted to kill.
One of the students, 14-year-old Evgenija, said she knew the shooter. “He was somehow silent, and appeared nice and had good grades. Did not know much about him, he was not that open to everyone. I would never expect that this could happen,” she told Reuters. “I heard noises and I thought some boys, some kids were throwing firecrackers, just for the fun of it, but then I heard that even closer and ... then I saw the security guard falling to the ground.”
Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic has said the shooter's father has been arrested.
Milan Milosevic, the father of one of the students at the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school where the shooting took place, said his daughter was in the classroom with the attacker. “She managed to escape. (The boy) ...first shot the teacher and then he started shooting randomly,” Milosevic told broadcaster N1. “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.”
Education Minister Branko Ruzic announced three days of public mourning from Friday.
Mass shootings are relatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict laws on gun purchases and has issued several amnesties for owners to surrender or register illegal guns. But the Western Balkans is awash with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following the wars and unrest of the 1990s.
In the deadliest shooting in Serbia, Ljubisa Bogdanovic killed 14 people in the central village of Velika Ivanca in 2013. On July 27, 2007, in the eastern village of Jabukovac, Nikola Radosavljevic killed nine people.
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