Eight students and the guard of a school in Belgrade were shot dead on Wednesday by another student, placed in psychiatry after this killing which caused a great shock in Serbia where shootings in schools are extremely rare.
The shooting took place in the morning at the Vladislav Ribnikar school, which caters for students aged 7 to 15, in central Belgrade.
“Eight children and a guard were killed, while six children and a teacher were injured,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
The children killed are seven girls and one boy, born in 2009, 2010 and 2011, Belgrade police chief Veselin Milic told a press conference.
A French student is one of these victims, said the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Two children and the teacher were seriously injured, according to Health Minister Danica Grujicic.
The student suspected of committing the crime, a thirteen-year-old boy, was found in the schoolyard shortly after the shooting and arrested.
The police were first alerted by the vice principal of the school, then the assailant himself called the police two minutes later. “He said he shot several people,” said Mr. Milic.
He “prepared for the shooting for a month, he made a list of children he planned to kill,” he said. “The sketch looks like something out of a video game or horror movie.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic addressed the nation in the evening, lamenting “one of the most difficult days in the contemporary history” of Serbia.
Mr Vucic explained that the teenager had been placed in a psychiatric hospital. Earlier in the day, the prosecution indicated that he could not answer in court because of his age.
The president proposed several measures, including a moratorium on firearms licenses for two years, stating that some 765,000 firearms were currently registered in this country of less than seven million inhabitants.
The suspect’s father was “arrested” and remanded in custody and his mother was “arrested” too, according to Mr. Vucic. The father, a doctor and owner of the gun used, had taken his son to a shooting range several times recently, he said.
“The father claims that the weapons were locked in a safe with a code, but apparently the child had the code, since he managed to take the pistols and three magazines with fifteen bullets each”, had explained earlier in the day Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic.
The government has declared three days of mourning. Classes will begin Thursday with a minute of silence in the country.
Shortly after the shooting, the police had cordoned off the perimeter around the school where many ambulances flocked.
Astrid Merlini, whose daughter was at school, said teachers moved quickly to hide the children.
“When (my daughter) saw the security guard fall, she rushed back to her class. She was scared. She told her teacher there was a shooting upstairs,” Ms Merlini said. at AFP. “The teacher immediately took the children to safety, locking them in the classroom”.
A local official, Milan Nedeljkovic, told the press that the school guard had intervened to protect the students.
“He wanted to prevent this tragedy and he died first,” said Nedeljkovic.
According to the Belgrade police chief, the suspect arrived at the school with a 9mm pistol, another small caliber, and four Molotov cocktails in his bag.
He opened fire on entering the school, first killing the guard and three students in the corridors before entering “the History class”. “As soon as he walked through the door, he shot the teacher and the other students,” Milic said.
He claimed that the police had not yet established the motive of the teenager, while some media spoke of possible violence he would have suffered from his classmates.
According to the Serbian president, the boy, one of the best students in his school, told the investigators that “nobody wanted to accept him (…) and that he then decided to commit this monstrous act”.
On Wednesday evening, thousands of people gathered in a downtown square and in the streets around the school district to light candles and lay messages and flowers around a makeshift monument, a reporter from the AFP.
“As a parent of two children, I felt the need to come here… Something has to be changed so that it doesn’t happen again,” Zdravko Spremo, a 48-year-old locksmith, told AFP. years.
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05/03/2023 23:15:16 – Belgrade (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
