Serbia Hit by Second Mass Shooting Day after Deadly School Attack

The drive-by attack late on Thursday came after eight children and a security guard were killed in mass shooting at a school on Wednesday.

Serbia entered an official three-day mourning period on Friday to pay tribute to the child victims.

Thursday’s shooting took place near Mladenovac, a town 50km (30 miles) south of the capital Belgrade.

The 21-year-old suspect used an automatic weapon to shoot randomly at people. He was on the run for hours before police arrested him early Friday, state broadcaster RTS TV reported.

Serbian Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic called the shooting “a terrorist act”.

Ambulances, special police and helicopter units were sent to the area.

Al Jazeera’s Bojana Stojanovic, reporting near Mladenovac, said the heavy police presence eased after the suspect was arrested.

“People felt relief after news of the arrest,” she said.

“We are all in a state of shock, people have still not captured their emotions after the school tragedy.

“Everyone is a bit more silent than they were. The loudest thing we can hear is shock. These things never happened in Serbia before, not in this measure”.

Serbia is reeling from Wednesday’s shooting rampage at the Vladislav Ribnikar primary school in central Belgrade, in which a 13-year-old boy used his father’s guns.

One of the child victims was a French citizen, the France’s foreign ministry said.

Earlier on Thursday, dozens of students, many wearing black, paid their respects.

People cried and hugged outside the school, still cordoned off by police, as they stood in front of heaps of flowers, small teddy bears and footballs.

The Balkans is among the top regions in Europe in the number of guns per capita and Serbia is awash with weapons left over from the wars of the 1990s.

Still, the country has strict gun laws and mass shootings are rare – the last was in 2013 when a war veteran killed 13 people in a central Serbian village.

Authorities on Thursday moved to further tighten gun control and police urged citizens to lock up their weapons and keep them away from children.

Police have said the teenage shooter planned Wednesday’s attack for a month, drawing sketches of classrooms at the school and compiling lists of the children he planned to kill.

One girl who was shot in the head remains in a life-threatening condition, while a boy is in serious condition with spinal injuries, doctors said on Thursday.

The school shooting suspect has not given any motive for his actions.

Experts have repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the number of weapons in a highly-divided country like Serbia, where convicted war criminals are glorified and violence against minority groups often goes unpunished.

They add there is also a risk from decades of instability stemming from the conflicts of the 1990s as well as ongoing economic hardship.

“We have had too much violence for too long,” psychologist Zarko Trebjesanin told N1 television. “Children copy models. We need to eliminate negative models … and create a different system of values.”