Source – Reuters- A boy gunned down fellow pupils in a Belgrade school on Wednesday morning in a pre-planned attack, shooting dead eight plus a security guard and wounding seven others, Serbian officials said.
Using two handguns that belonged to his father, the 13-year-old fired first at the guard and three girls in the hallway and then entered a history class and shot the teacher and classmates, police said. The teacher and six pupils were hospitalised, some with life-threatening injuries.
Veselin Milic, head of Belgrade police, said the attacker had two guns and two petrol bombs and had planned everything carefully. “He even had … names of children he wanted to kill and their classes,” he told a press conference.
Police said a seventh-grade student had been arrested after confessing to the shooting. An investigation into the motives for the attack was underway, they said, as Education Minister Branko Ruzic declared three days of national mourning.
Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic said the suspect’s father, who held the guns legally, had also been arrested.
Serbia’s prosecution service said in a statement to the Tanjug news agency that the father would be charged over the shooting but not his son, who was 13, putting him below the legal age of criminal responsibility, which is 14 in Serbia.
Gun ownership is widespread in Serbia, which has witnessed several mass shootings over the past decade and where hundreds of thousands of weapons remain unaccounted for after the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Wednesday’s shooting happened at Vladislav Ribnikar, an elementary school in Vracar, a central Belgrade district.
Evgenija, 14, said she knew the suspected gunman.
“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…. But then I saw the security guard falling to the ground,” she said, adding that she then ran away.
The interior ministry said eight children and a security guard had been killed and six children had been hospitalised along with the teacher.(REUTERS)
