Bosnia: a minor arrested after a shooting in a school

June 14, 2023

A teenager suspected of seriously shooting a teacher at a school in Lukavac, northeastern Bosnia, on Wednesday has been arrested by law enforcement, local authorities and his family said. the victim.

The shooting comes a month after a 13-year-old student killed nine of his classmates and a guard at a school in Belgrade, neighboring Serbia.

“The child, who is not yet 14 years old, is under police supervision at the police station in Lukavac,” the Tuzla canton interior ministry said in a statement.

“Firearms and other abandoned objects have been placed in a safe place until the investigation begins”, adds the ministry, which specifies that an employee of a school was injured.

The police have established a security perimeter around the establishment.

According to Ahmed Omerovic, the Minister of Education of the canton of Tuzla, the alleged perpetrator of the shooting is a former student who recently changed schools.

“The child was transferred to another school at the beginning of the second semester for disciplinary reasons,” he said, also announcing the end of classes in all schools in Tuzla canton.

The victim is an English teacher who also served as the elementary school’s deputy principal, his father told local reporters. In Bosnia, these schools serve children from six to 15 years old.

“It’s true, he’s my son,” Ismet Osmanovic told regional television N1, adding that he had been hospitalized and was undergoing surgery. “Doctors told me he was in stable condition.”

According to the hospital located in the nearby town of Tuzla, the victim was “wounded by bullets in the neck”. “The patient was intubated and is undergoing operations,” Tuzla University Central Clinic said in a statement quoted by local media.

In early May, the massacre in a school in Belgrade, followed less than 48 hours later by a second shooting in which eight people were killed by a 21-year-old suspect, had sown terror in Serbia and throughout the Balkans.

Vigils in memory of the victims had been organized in several towns in the former Yugoslavia, including in Bosnia.

During the inter-community war that killed around 100,000 people in the 1990s, an unknown quantity of weapons were smuggled into the country.

After the end of the conflict in 1995, the authorities had regularly called on the Bosnians to surrender their weapons, decreeing an amnesty for all those who would do so voluntarily. The police also carried out operations to recover weapons from the homes of people suspected of possessing them.

Despite everything, a large number of weapons circulate in the country. More than 31 out of every 100 people own a firearm, according to the Small Arms Survey (SAS) research project. In Serbia, this rate is 39%, the highest in Europe.