According to the Serbian Interior Ministry, Serbian police arrested a suspect early Friday morning after an hours-long manhunt throughout the night for the gunman who killed eight people and wounded at least 14. other near Belgrade.
The shooting late on Thursday was the second mass shooting nationwide in as many days and rocked a nation still reeling from an attack at a school that left eight students dead.
The arrest was made near the city of Kragujevac, about 40 miles south of the shooting site, according to the ministry.
According to RTS, Serbia’s public broadcaster, hundreds of policemen went door to door searching for a 21-year-old male suspect. They deployed helicopters and surrounded the area where they believed he was hiding, the report said.
According to RTS, the gunman sitting in a moving vehicle used an automatic weapon and fled the scene, saying the attack took place around Mladenovac, a municipality south of the capital Belgrade.
The Serbian Interior Ministry told CNN the shooting took place at 11 p.m. local time. Not sure how long it lasted.
The gunman first opened fire in a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, killing a police officer and his sister, along with others there, RTS reported. He later moved to the neighboring villages of Mali Orasje and Sepsin, the broadcaster said.
Serbia’s Interior Minister, Bratislav Gasic, called the shooting an “act of terrorism”, RTS reported.
The villages where the attack took place are sparsely populated suburbs on the southeastern edge of Belgrade, near the slopes of Mount Kosmaj. RTS reported that, after an initial search in the dark with a thermal imaging camera, police began a reality search as dawn broke, going door to door.
Serbian authorities did not provide details on a motive for the shooting, according to N1, a Serbian cable news channel.
The day before Thursday’s attack, a seventh grader armed with a pistol and Molotov cocktail diedshoot eight children and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, plunging the capital into grief and shocking the whole country.
Following that shooting, the Serbian government on Thursday passed a series of measures aimed at tightening gun regulations, including establishing a two-year ban on new licenses and increasing supervision of schools. shoot. Changes proposed by the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic. On Wednesday, he called on the government to address the root of the violence.
The country’s Ministry of the Interior urge gun owners to ensure that their weapons are locked, unloaded, and segregated from ammunition. The department said it will go through the gun owners registry to check if the weapon is properly stored and seize the weapon or take other action against the owner if they are not. do like that.
Serbia has historically had a high rate of gun ownership compared to other countries — due to its recent history of armed conflict and cultural traditions of gun ownership — but does not have high levels of gun violence, according to the report. an October 2022 report by the Flemish Institute for Peacean independent research group.
According to the report, between 2015 and 2019, 125 people were killed in gun-related homicides in Serbia, a country of about 7 million people. According to Small arms survey 2018Serbia ranks third in the world, behind the United States and Yemen in civilian firearm ownership, with an estimated 39 guns per 100 people.
Serbia has done strict regulations about firearms since firearms became widely available due to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Gun owners must have no prison record and no criminal record in the past 4 years, receive training in handling handle firearms, undergo periodic medical checks, and have safe storage.
Serbia has seen a number of mass shootings in recent years. 2016a man killed five people at a coffee shop in the north of the country. In 2015a man killed 4 people after his son’s wedding, including his wife, new daughter-in-law and her parents. In 2013, a 60-year-old veteran of the Balkan wars killed 13 people, including relatives and neighbors, in the village of Velika Ivanca near Belgrade. And in July 2007A 38-year-old man killed nine people passing by on a street in the village of Jabukovac, eastern Serbia.
This is an evolving story. It will be updated.
