Serbia hit by 2nd mass shooting day after fatal school attack

The incident took place late on Thursday near the town of Mladenovac, 50km (30 miles) south of Belgrade, according to state television.

The 21-year-old attacker 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, as well as special police and helicopter units, have been sent to the area.

The Mladenovac attack comes as Serbia reels from a shooting rampage at a central Belgrade school in which a 13-year-old boy used his father’s guns to kill eight of his schoolmates and a security guard. One of the dead children was a French citizen, the France’s foreign ministry said.

Earlier on Thursday, dozens of students, many wearing black and carrying flowers, paid their respects to the victims. People cried and hugged outside the school, still cordoned off by police following Wednesday’s attack, 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 the last mass shooting 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 guns and keep them away from children.

Police have said the shooter, whom they identified as Kosta Kecmanovic, planned the attack for a month, drawing sketches of classrooms at the Vladislav Ribnikar primary school and compiling lists of the children he planned to kill.

MNA/PR