A teenager shot dead eight students and a school guard in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Six more minors and a teacher were injured and are hospitalized, reported PA.
The shooter, born in 2009, was arrested in the schoolyard, where he was also studying and was identified by his initials, KK.
The police reported that he had used a weapon belonging to his father and that he had containers with a flammable liquid in his backpack.
“I could hear the shots. It was non-stop,” recounted a student who was in a sports class downstairs. “I didn’t know what was happening. We were getting some messages on the phone.”
“He had good grades, but we didn’t know much about him,” described one student. “He wasn’t that open with everyone. He surely didn’t expect this to happen.”
“He (the shooter) shot the teacher first and then the children who were hiding under the desks,” said Milan Milosevic, the father of a student witness.
A student from the class testified on local television nova.rs that the shooter fired indiscriminately: “He started shooting at random, he had two cartridges in his hands, I lay down on top of two of our friends so they would think I was dead too…”, he said.
The police cordoned off the blocks around the school in the center of Belgrade.
These types of events are extremely rare in that country. In the latest mass shooting, a 2013 Balkan War veteran killed 13 people in a central Serbian village.
Experts, however, warn about the amount of weapons that still circulate in the Balkan area after the wars of the 1990s.
