BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — A gunman apparently capturing at random killed eight folks and wounded 14 in three Serbian villages, authorities mentioned, shaking a nation nonetheless within the throes of grief over a mass capturing a day earlier. Police arrested a suspect Friday after an all-night manhunt.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic known as Thursday’s capturing an assault on the entire nation.
It got here a day after a 13-year-old boy used his father’s weapons to kill eight fellow college students and a guard at a college in Belgrade, the capital.
The bloodshed despatched shockwaves by means of a Balkan nation scarred by wars, however unused to mass murders. Though Serbia is awash with weapons left over from the wars of the Nineteen Nineties, Wednesday’s capturing was the primary at a college within the nation’s fashionable historical past.
The final mass capturing earlier than this week was in 2013, when a conflict veteran killed 13 folks in a central Serbian village.
Late Thursday, an attacker shot at folks in three villages close to Mladenovac, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of the capital. Vucic mentioned the assailant focused folks “wherever they were.”
“I heard some tak-tak-tak sounds,” recalled Milan Prokic, a resident of Dubona, close to Mladenovac. Prokic mentioned he first thought folks have been capturing to have fun a delivery, as is custom in Serbia.
“But it wasn’t that. Shame, great shame,” Prokic added.
Police mentioned a suspect, recognized by the initials U.B., was arrested close to the central Serbian city of Kragujevac, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Belgrade.
Authorities launched a photograph of the suspect in a police automobile, displaying a younger man in a blue T-shirt with an inscription and a map of a part of Europe on it.
Vucic vowed to the nation in an handle that the suspect “will never again see the light of the day.” He referred to the assault as an act of terror, as is typical and introduced a collection of “anti-terrorist” measures, together with the hiring of 1,200 policemen and placing a police officer on guard every day at colleges.
Before the second capturing, Serbia spent a lot of Thursday reeling. Students, many carrying black and carrying flowers, crammed streets across the faculty in central Belgrade as they paid silent homage to slain friends. Serbian academics’ unions introduced protests and strikes to warn a few disaster within the faculty system and demand modifications.
The similar day, authorities moved to spice up gun management, as police urged residents to lock up their weapons and maintain them away from youngsters. The authorities ordered a two-year moratorium on short-barrel weapons and more durable sentences for individuals who allow minors to get ahold of weapons.
Under present regulation, a registered gun proprietor in Serbia should be over 18, wholesome, and don’t have any prison document. Weapons should be saved locked and individually from ammunition.
Wednesday’s capturing on the Vladislav Ribnikar faculty additionally left seven folks hospitalized, six youngsters and a instructor. One woman who was shot within the head stays in life-threatening situation, and a boy is in critical situation with spinal accidents, docs mentioned Thursday.
Authorities have recognized the shooter as Kosta Kecmanovic and mentioned he’s too younger to be charged and tried. He has been positioned in a psychological hospital, and his father has been detained on suspicion of endangering public safety.
Gun possession is widespread in Serbia and elsewhere within the Balkans: The nation has one of many highest variety of firearms per capita on this planet. And weapons are sometimes fired into the air at celebrations within the area.
Experts have repeatedly warned of the hazard posed by the variety of weapons in Serbia, a extremely divided nation the place convicted conflict criminals are regularly glorified and violence in opposition to minority teams typically goes unpunished. They additionally observe that a long time of instability stemming from the conflicts of the Nineteen Nineties, in addition to ongoing financial hardship, might set off such outbursts.
Dragan Popadic, a psychology professor at Belgrade University, instructed The Associated Press that the college capturing has uncovered the extent of violence current in society and induced a deep shock.
“People suddenly have been shaken into reality and the ocean of violence that we live in, how it has grown over time and how much our society has been neglected for decades,” he warned. “It is as if flashlights have been lit over our lives and we can no longer just mind our own business.”
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AP journalist Sabina Niksic contributed from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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