Serbian Shooting Claims 8 Lives, Day After School Massacre Killed 9

Serbian police arrested a suspect early Friday after an hourslong overnight manhunt for the gunman who killed eight people and injured at least 14 others near Belgrade, according to Serbia’s Interior Ministry.

The shooting late Thursday was the nation’s second mass shooting in as many days and rattled a country still reeling from an attack at a school that killed eight students.

The arrest was made near the city of Kragujevac, about 40 miles south of where the shootings began, according to the ministry.

Hundreds of police officers had gone door to door in the search for a 21-year-old male suspect, according to RTS, Serbia’s public broadcaster. They deployed helicopters and surrounded the area where they believed he was hiding, the report said.

The gunman, who was in a moving vehicle, used an automatic weapon and fled the scene, according to RTS, which said the attack took place around Mladenovac, a municipality in the southern part of the capital, Belgrade.

The shooting took place at 11 p.m. local time, Serbia’s Interior Ministry told CNN. It is not clear how long it lasted.

The gunman first opened fire in a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, killing a police officer and his sister, in addition to others there, RTS reported. He then moved on to the neighboring villages of Mali Orasje and Sepsin, the broadcaster said.

Serbia’s interior minister, Bratislav Gasic, called the shooting “a terrorist act,” RTS reported.

The villages where the attack took place are sparsely populated suburban areas on the southeastern edge of the city of Belgrade, near the slopes of Mount Kosmaj. After initially searching in darkness with thermal imaging cameras, the police began a physical search as dawn broke, going door to door, RTS reported.

The Serbian authorities offered no details about a motive for the shooting, according to N1, a Serbian cable news channel.

A day before Thursday’s attack, a seventh-grade student armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails fatally ​shot eight children and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, plunging the capital into grief and stunning the nation.

After that shooting, the Serbian government approved on Thursday a series of measures to tighten gun regulations, including setting a two-year moratorium on new licenses and enhanced surveillance of shooting ranges. The changes followed suggestions by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic. On Wednesday, he urged the government to address the roots of the violence.

The country’s Interior Ministry urged gun owners to ensure their weapons were locked away, unloaded and separated from ammunition. The ministry said it would go through the registry of gun owners to check that arms were properly stored and seize weapons or take other actions against owners if they were not.

Serbia has historically had a high level of gun ownership compared with other countries — because of its recent history of armed conflict and a cultural tradition of owning guns — but has not had high levels of gun violence, according to an October 2022 report by the Flemish Peace Institute, an independent research group.

From 2015 through 2019, 125 people were killed in firearm-related homicides in Serbia, a country of about seven million people, according to the report. According to the 2018 Small Arms Survey, Serbia ranks third in the world, after the United States and Yemen in civilian firearm ownership, with an estimated 39 firearms per 100 people.

Serbia has implemented stringent regulations on firearms since guns became widely available as a result of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Gun owners must have no history of imprisonment and have no criminal record in the past four years, be trained in handling firearms, undergo routine medical examinations and have a safe storage space.

Serbia has had several mass shootings in recent years. In 2016, a man killed five people at a cafe in the country’s north. In 2015, a man killed four people after his son’s wedding, including his wife, his new daughter-in-law and her parents. In 2013, a 60-year-old veteran of the Balkan wars killed 13 people, including relatives and neighbors, in the village of Velika Ivanca near Belgrade. And in July 2007, a 38-year-old man killed nine people who had been passing by on a street in the village of Jabukovac in eastern Serbia.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.