At least nine people have been killed after a teenager opened fire at an elementary school in Serbia. A security guard and eight students were killed following the shooting at a school in Belgrade on Wednesday morning. Six more children and a teacher were injured.
The suspect opened fire at the Vladislav RIbnikar elementary school at around 8.40am. Officers in helmets and bulletproof vests cordoned off the area around where the shooting took place.
Police identified the shooter by his initials, K.K., and said he had opened fire with his father’s gun. He was arrested in the schoolyard, police said. A statement identified him as a student at the school in central Belgrade who was born in 2009.
"I saw kids running out from the school, screaming. Parents came, they were in panic. Later I heard three shots," a girl who attends a high school adjacent to Vladislav Ribnikar told state TV RTS.
Casualties are being treated and an investigation into the motives behind the shooting is under way, police said in a statement, without giving further details.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws, but the western Balkans are awash with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following wars and unrest in the 1990s.
Serbian authorities have issued several amnesties for owners to hand in or register illegal guns. Police said that all available police patrols in the area were sent to the scene.
“All available police patrols were dispatched to the scene, where they immediately went onto the school grounds and apprehended a minor, a seventh-grader who is suspected to have fired several shots from his father’s gun at students and the school security guard,” the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a statement.
“The wounded are being administered medical care, while the police work to establish the facts and circumstances that led to this incident,” the ministry statement says.
Local media footage from the scene showed commotion outside the school as police removed the suspect, whose head was covered as officers led him to a car parked in the street.
Milan Milosevic, the father of one of the pupils at the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school, said his daughter was in the classroom when the shooting began.
"She managed to escape. (The boy) ...first shot the teacher and then he started shooting randomly," Mr Milosevic told broadcaster N1. Nova TV, another broadcaster, said the teacher had died.
