Serbia is in mourning. Yesterday’s shooting was “the worst tragedy that Serbia and our education system has suffered”, according to the country’s authorities, hours after the incident. “No one can return the children to their parents”, lamented the Minister of Education, Branko Ruzic.
Eight minors and a security guard died in a school in Belgrade at the hands of a 14-year-old student, who had been planning the attack for a month.
The shooting took place in the morning, around 8:40 a.m., at the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school in the Vracar neighborhood of central Belgrade, on the first day of school after spring break. According to the Serbian Minister of the Interior, Bratislav Gasic, in a press conference, the teenager entered the history class and opened fire on the teacher and his classmates, and then called the police. Immediately afterwards, the alleged shooter was arrested by the security forces.
Eight of the victims are minors, seven girls and one boy, in addition to the school’s security guard, who reportedly died trying to prevent the attack. Among the injured, there was the teacher, a student – ​​in critical condition – and two boys – who are in a stable situation – who were treated in hospitals in the city immediately after the shots.
According to authorities, the attacker organized the shooting a month in advance, with an elaborate plan that included the list of children to target and details of which classrooms he would target first. The police also found a plan of school exits and entrances on the minor’s desk.
A student from the class who witnessed the shooting told local television Nova.rs that the shooter was shooting indiscriminately: “He was shooting at random, he had two cartridges in his hands, I stood on top of two of our friends so that I thought I was dead too…” he said.
The suspect, named Kosta K by local media, was a student at the school born in 2009, with no history of mental disorders who, according to people around him, was “quiet and a good student”. However, as confirmed by the Head of Education, he had been bullied at school by his classmates. The Minister of the Interior assured that the boy was fond of hunting and had learned to shoot while practicing this activity.
The minister indicated that the two guns used by the alleged assailant were licensed and believed to be the property of the child’s father, who was also taken into police custody earlier this afternoon. “The father claims that he had more than one gun and that he kept them under lock and key”, explained Gasic, who added that the teenager contrived to get the two guns and three magazines with fifteen bullets each. In addition to the two weapons, Kosta K had prepared four Molotov cocktails which he left in a bag on the way to school.
The shooting has caused a deep debate in the dismayed Serbian society, which cannot quite explain how this event could have happened. The Government points to the familiarization of violence associated with new technologies (it is worth remembering that the slaughter is happening at the same time as the war in Ukraine is being broadcast live on TikTok), but it also accuses the influence of the West based on the multiple shootings that have occurred in the United States in recent months. The Minister of Education pointed out “video games, the internet and Western values” as precursors of the minor’s action, in a press conference hours after the tragedy. However, Ruzic did not mention the shootings in Izhevsk (2022) and Kerch (2018), in Russia, which left 19 and 21 dead respectively.
On the other hand, the head of Education talked about enacting laws to address the issue of bullying, but made it clear that this is only part of the problem. The country’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, reported that the young man has been admitted to a psychiatric facility.
Shootings of this kind are not common in Serbia, because the laws governing the possession of weapons are very strict. However, as in other Western Balkan countries, there are thousands of illegal weapons that were never handed over after the wars of the 1990s. According to a Small Arms Survey study published in 2018, Serbia is the third country in the world with the most guns per capita, tied with the small neighboring republic of Montenegro.
Serbia decreed three days of national mourning that will last from Friday to Sunday.
