Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced Friday a vast disarmament plan after two killings committed in less than 48 hours in the small Balkan country, where weapons circulate massively.
The two shootings, in which a total of 17 people died, horrified the Serbs. Their president promised to drastically reduce the number of legally held weapons and to tackle the problem of illegal weapons with a view to achieving “almost complete disarmament of Serbia”.
“It is an attack on our entire country and all citizens feel it,” the head of state told the nation.
The government said in a statement that it wanted to “reduce by 90% the number of small arms held by individuals and businesses”. The Interior Ministry will also “launch a public appeal to holders of illegal weapons and explosive devices to hand them over (to the authorities) within a month without risk of prosecution”.
Vucic’s pledge comes after a man was arrested on Friday on suspicion of killing eight people and injuring at least 14 others.
This second shooting, in a country already in shock after the massacre committed on Wednesday in a school in Belgrade, took place around midnight in three villages near Mladenovac, about sixty kilometers south of the capital. A 21-year-old suspect opened fire on the victims from a moving car, according to public television RTS.
A long hunt ensued, mobilizing around 600 law enforcement officers, including members of a special anti-terrorist unit.
“Following an extensive manhunt, members of the Interior Ministry arrested U.B., born in 2002,” the Interior Ministry said.
“He is suspected of having killed (…) eight people and of having injured fourteen others”, according to the same source, which specifies that all the injured people are hospitalized.
Authorities said the suspect was arrested near the town of Kragujevac in central Serbia, about 90 km from the scene of the shooting.
The man was found at the home of a relative after taking a taxi driver hostage who then alerted the authorities, according to President Vucic.
He was in possession of a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, including four grenades and a Kalashnikov.
The tragedy came less than two days after the worst mass school shooting in recent Balkan history: a 13-year-old student on Wednesday killed nine people, eight children and a guard, at a school in central Belgrade.
Pope Francis said he was “deeply saddened” by the two incidents in a telegram in Serbian sent by the number two of the Vatican. “His holiness is united in spirit with the human pain of those who mourn the death of innocent victims”.
The dread was palpable in Serbia, where thousands of residents went to improvised memorial sites to pay their respects to the victims. Others lined up to donate blood.
The second incident began in a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, where the assailant opened fire, killing several people, including an off-duty policeman and his sister.
He then shot people in two other villages, Malo Orasje and Sepsin, before fleeing, according to RTS.
“We heard gunshots in the evening, but I thought it was fireworks, children were having fun. I couldn’t even imagine such a thing was happening,” Dubona resident Zvonko Mladenovic told AFP.
He explained that his cousin’s granddaughter was among the victims. “She came to visit her grandfather. That’s where the young people were hanging out and… she was shot in the head,” Mladenovic said. “First the kids in Belgrade and now this.”
Slobodan Nikolic, another Dubona resident, said a group of young people were singing on a bench before the shooting. An AFP photographer saw traces of blood around a bench in the village.
Worried relatives gathered outside a medical center in Belgrade, where at least eight injured people were hospitalized, according to N1 television.
As a result of the school shooting, Serbia begins three days of national mourning on Friday at a time when people normally celebrate the arrival of spring by storming terraces and parks.
Mass killings are extremely rare in Serbia and Aleksandar Vucic lamented “one of the most difficult days in the contemporary history” of the country.
A large number of firearms have been circulating in the Balkans since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the bloody wars of the 1990s.
Some 765,000 weapons, including more than 232,000 pistols, are legally registered in the country of less than seven million people where shooting ranges are popular.
In April 2013, a villager shot and killed 13 people, including family members and neighbors, near Mladenovac.
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05/05/2023 16:33:13 – Mladenovac (Serbia) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
