Global Courant 2023-05-05 11:27:53
Serbian police said they have arrested a suspect in a drive-by shooting attack that left at least eight dead and 14 injured, the country’s second mass shooting in two days.
In a statement, police said the man, identified by the initials UB, was arrested early Friday morning near the central Serbian town of Kragujevac, about 100 kilometers south of Belgrade.
The arrest followed a nighttime search by hundreds of police officers, who cordoned off an area south of Belgrade where the shooting took place Thursday evening.
“I heard some tak-tak-tak sounds,” recalls Milan Prokic, a resident of Dubona, a village near the town of Mladenovac. Prokic said he first thought villagers fired to celebrate a delivery, as is tradition in Serbia and the Balkans.
‘But it wasn’t. Shame, great shame,” added Prokic. “They say the boy killed them for no reason. They say there was a fight here in the center of the village, he went home, took his guns and came back to kill them.
Prokic said he did not believe this: “If it were true, why did he go to neighboring villages to kill?”
Another Dubona villager also said he heard gunfire late last night and came out of his house.
“I smelled the smell of gunpowder. I heard noise from the direction of school. We saw people lying on the ground,” says the man, who refused to give his name because he feared for his safety.
The attacker randomly shot at people in the villages near Mladenovac, some 50 kilometers south of the capital, according to RTS.
Serbian Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic called Thursday’s drive-by shootings “an act of terrorism,” state media reported.
Hundreds of special police and helicopter units, as well as ambulances, were dispatched to the area, which has been sealed off as police search for the attacker.
The shooting came a day after a 13-year-old boy used his father’s guns to kill eight fellow students and a security guard at a Belgrade school.
The carnage sent shockwaves through a Balkan country scarred by wars but unaccustomed to mass killings.
Although Serbia is overrun with weapons left over from the wars of the 1990s, Wednesday’s school shooting was the first in the country’s modern history. The last mass shooting before this week was in 2013, when a war veteran killed 13 people in a central Serbian village.
Before the attack, Serbia spent much of Thursday recovering from its first mass shooting in a decade. Students, many dressed in black and holding flowers, filled the streets around the school in central Belgrade as they silently paid tribute to slain peers. Serbian teachers’ unions announced protests and strikes to warn of a crisis in the school system and demand changes.
Schoolchildren light candles at the Vladislav Ribnikar School in Belgrade, Serbia, on Thursday.Armin Durgut/AP
On the same day, authorities took steps to strengthen gun control as police urged citizens to keep their guns under lock and key and to keep them away from children. The government has imposed a two-year moratorium on short-barreled weapons, stricter controls on people with guns and firing ranges, and harsher penalties for those who enable minors to obtain guns.
A registered gun owner in Serbia must be over the age of 18, be healthy and have no criminal record. Weapons should be kept locked and separate from ammunition.
The Wednesday morning shooting at Vladislav Ribnikar primary school also left seven people hospitalized, six children and a teacher. A girl who was shot in the head remains in a life-threatening condition and a boy is in serious condition with spinal injuries, doctors said Thursday morning.
Authorities have said the shooter, who has been identified by police as Kosta Kecmanovic, is too young to be charged and tried. He has been placed in a mental institution, while his father has been detained on suspicion of endangering public safety because his son got hold of guns.
Gun culture is widespread in Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans: the region has one of the highest numbers of guns per capita in Europe. Celebrations often involve shooting guns into the air, and the cult of the warrior is part of national identities.
Experts have repeatedly warned of the danger posed by the abundance of guns in the deeply divided country, where convicted war criminals are glorified and violence against minority groups often goes unpunished. They also note that decades of instability resulting from the conflicts of the 1990s, as well as continued economic hardship, could trigger such outbursts.
Dragan Popadic, a psychology professor at Belgrade University, told The Associated Press that the school shooting exposed the violence in society and caused deep shock.
“People are suddenly shaken up at the reality and the ocean of violence we live in, how it has grown over time and how much our society has been neglected for decades,” he warned. “It’s like flashlights have been lit over our lives and we can no longer mind our own business.”
