8 Are Dead in Shooting in Serbia, a Day After School Massacre

DUBONA, Serbia — Police in Serbia arrested a suspect early Friday after an overnight hunt for a gunman who killed eight people in a rural area near Belgrade, as 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 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 Friday.

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, about 40 miles south of where the attacks began, and which later continued through a string of suburbs 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.”

Hundreds of police officers had gone door to door searching 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 before he was arrested, the report said.

The shootings took place around 11 p.m. local time Thursday, Serbia’s Interior Ministry told CNN. It was not clear how long the shootings lasted or exactly where they had begun. The gunman, who was alone, fired shots from an automatic rifle from a moving vehicle, and then fled, according to RTS.

He opened fire near a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, killing a police officer and his sister, in addition to one other person there, according to several local residents. He also shot dead five people on the outskirts of the neighboring village of Malo Orasje, according to relatives of the victims. Vucic confirmed that the gunman had perpetrated attacks in both areas.

In Dubona, a small village where vineyards extend through hilly landscapes, Zlatko Vujic said his 25-year-old nephew was among those shot dead by the gunman. Vujic said the suspect, whom he knew, had been working at a nearby fruit farm.

“He was just a kid,” he said, his voice quavering, referring to the suspect.

He said the gunman’s father had served in the Balkan wars that led to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Vucic said that the gunman’s father is a deputy colonel in the Serbian army.

Vucic called Thursday’s shooting a “terrorist act” and said he would introduce stricter gun control measures, harsher fines for illegal arms and a stronger police presence in schools. Serbia would increase its police force by 1,200 officers over the next six months, with one officer in every school while classes are in session, he said.

The new gun control measures would include a full audit, including psychological and drug tests, of all legal gun owners. The Interior Ministry would give gun owners a one-month grace period to surrender illegal arms. Of the roughly 400,000 legal, registered guns in Serbia, excluding hunting weapons, Vucic said he expected just 10%, at most, to remain in the hands of citizens once his planned changes came into effect. He did not specify how he would do that.

Jail time for possessing unregistered firearms would increase by up to 15 years, depending on the circumstances, Vucic said.

On Friday morning, large blood stains were still visible on the road in Dubona where the gunman had shot two people.

“It’s a shock,” Javorka Pavlovic, a resident of the village, said as she stood close to where one of the shootings took place.

Pavlovic said she heard the gunshots late in the night but thought that they were fireworks.

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

Forensic teams were at work throughout the area. In Dubona, officials put crime scene labels near a bench in front of a school where a young man was reportedly killed. On a road between Dubona and Malo Orasje, a nearby village where the gunman shot several people dead, forensic scientists used a metal detector to search the area, apparently looking for bullets.

Police officers and army officials Friday morning surrounded the house of the gunman’s family in the tiny village of Donja Dubona.

Stefan Markovic, 29, a resident of the village who said he had known the gunman since they were children, said his father had kept numerous weapons in the house. He described a family wedding he attended a few years ago, in which the suspect’s father and other family members shot rifles into the air to celebrate.

Serbs are known to have stockpiles of weapons left over from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The country 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 report by the Flemish Peace Institute, an independent research group.

Vucic’s pledge to tighten gun laws came a day after the Serbian government approved a series of measures, including setting a two-year moratorium on new licenses and enhanced surveillance of shooting ranges.

Those measures came into effect in response to Wednesday’s attack, when a seventh-grade student fatally ​shot eight other children and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, plunging the capital into grief.

“There isn’t a mother who slept in the last 24 hours in Serbia,” Vucic said.

He promised increased vigilance by authorities in the coming two weeks.

The 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.

From 2015 through 2019, 125 people were killed in firearm-related homicides in Serbia, a country of about 7 million people, according to the report. Serbia ranks third in the world after the United States and Yemen in civilian firearm ownership, with an estimated 39 firearms per 100 people, according to a 2018 report by the Small Arms Survey, a group based in Geneva that researches trends in small arms.

Serbia has enacted 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’s last mass shooting occurred in 2016, when 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 article originally appeared in The New York Times .