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regular-article-logo Saturday, 04 May 2024

Eight persons killed, 14 wounded in second Serbia shooting in two days

The attack late on Thursday came a day after a seventh grader armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails killed eight students and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital

New York TIimes News Service Belgrade (Serbia) Published 06.05.23, 06:20 AM
Security personnel in Dubona, Serbia, on Friday after the shooting. (Reuters)

Security personnel in Dubona, Serbia, on Friday after the shooting. (Reuters) ANTONIO BRONIC

The police in Serbia arrested a suspect early on Friday after an overnight hunt for a gunman who killed eight people in a rural area near Belgrade, the Balkan nation, which has one of the world’s highest rates of gun ownership but where gun violence is rare, struggled to come to terms with its second mass shooting in two days.

The attack late on Thursday, in which at least 14 others were wounded, came a day after a seventh grader armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails killed eight students and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital. An official three-day mourning period for the earlier shooting was to begin on Friday.

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President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia on Friday said he planned to make sweeping changes to the country’s gun regulations that went beyond measures he outlined a day earlier, promising an “almost complete disarmament” of Serbia.

“We’ve been walking around like zombies the last 24 hours, looking for a reason something like this could happen,” Vucic said in a news conference, explaining his decision to take a stronger stance on gun control. Vucic announced an additional three days of mourning.

The suspect in the second shooting was arrested near the city of Kragujevac, 63km south of where the attacks began, and which later continued through a string of suburbs to the south of Belgrade, according to Serbian officials. He was wearing a T-shirt reading “Generation 88” when arrested, Vucic said, referencing a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler”.

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