Serbian Police have identified and arrested the 13-year-old boy who opened fire in a planned attack that killed eight children in a classroom and a school security guard.
The student also injured six pupils as well as his teacher.
Police named the shooter as Kosta Kecmanović and said he had been a pupil at the school in the centre of the Serbian capital since 2019.
They said he had used two of his father’s guns for the shooting and may have been plotting the attack for a month.
The head of Belgrade Police, Veselin Milić, identified the dead pupils as seven girls and a boy born between 2009 and 2011.
He said the teenage boy also had two petrol bombs and “made a list of kids he planned to kill and their classes”.
“The sketch looks like something from a video game or a horror movie, which indicates that he planned in detail, by classes, whom to liquidate,” he added.
The suspect, who was arrested in the school playground after confessing to the shooting and led away with his head covered, fired first at the security guard and three girls in a hallway, then walked into a history class and shot the teacher and five pupils, Milić said.
Because he is under 14, Kecmanović can’t face criminal charges, the Belgrade prosecutor’s office said.
He will be placed in a psychiatric institution. His parents have also been arrested.
“The father claimed the arms were locked in a safe with a code, but apparently the kid had the code,” Serbia’s interior minister, Bratislav Gašić, said.
“He took the pistols and three magazines with 15 bullets each.”
The education minister, Branko Ružić, declared three days of mourning, and the health minister, Danica Grujičić, a neurosurgeon, wept as she called the events “perhaps the most horrifying experience I have had as a doctor and as a human being”.
Milan Milošević, the father of a pupil at the Vladislav Ribnikar school, said his daughter was in the class where the gun was fired.
“She managed to escape. [The boy] … first shot the teacher and then started shooting randomly,” he told the broadcaster N1.
Milošević, who said he rushed to the school after hearing of the shooting, added: “I saw the security guard lying under the table. I saw two girls with blood on their shirts. They say [the shooter] was quiet and a good pupil.”
A pupil who was in a sports class downstairs when the gunfire erupted told local media: “I was able to hear the shooting. It was non-stop. I didn’t know what was happening. We were receiving some messages on the phone.”
The pupil, who was not named, described the suspect as a “quiet guy” who “looked nice”.
She said he had “good grades, but we didn’t know much about him. He was not so open with everybody. Surely I wasn’t expecting this to happen.”
An interior ministry statement said eight children and a security guard had been killed and six children had been taken to hospital, along with the teacher.
Milan Nedeljković, the local mayor, said doctors were fighting to save the teacher’s life.
Nedeljković said the school security guard had probably prevented more deaths by putting himself in the line of fire.
He “wanted to prevent the tragedy, and was the first victim,” Nedeljković told reporters outside the school.
Serbia’s health minister, Danica Grujicic, said at the news conference that four people, including three students and a teacher, had been admitted to the Clinical Center of Serbia after 9 a.m., and were being treated for gunshot wounds.
Three other students were being treated at a Children’s hospital, called Tirshova, where one student in “unstable condition” was receiving surgery for a severe head injury, the health minister said.
The head of Belgrade’s university hospital, Milika Asanin, said it was treating three pupils and the teacher.
He said: “One patient was reanimated. He had chest injury and a neck injury. One pupil was shot in the left leg, one in the stomach and both arms. The teacher has a stomach injury and injuries to both hands.”
One of the students, around 13 years old, had “life-threatening injuries” to his chest, neck and spine, she said. And the teacher, who was born in 1970, had also suffered injuries to her pelvis and both hands.
Photographs released by news agencies showed the police detaining the student, whose head was covered with a dark piece of clothing. Chief Milic who did not offer any motive for the shooting, said at the news conference on Wednesday that teachers characterized the suspect as a “good student and good friend” who had not previously attracted attention.
Serbia has traditionally had a high level of gun ownership compared with other countries because of its recent history of armed conflict and a cultural and historical tradition of owning guns, but it does not have high levels of gun violence, according to an October 2022 report by the Flemish Peace Institute, an independent research group.
Most people who own guns in Serbia are men, 94.7 percent, and they are often middle-aged and older, the report said.
From 2015 through 2019, there were 125 people killed in firearm-related homicides in Serbia, according to the report.
From 2015 through 2019, five people between the ages of 14 and 17 committed gun homicides in Serbia, according to the institute’s report.
In that same period, one person under age 18 was killed in a gun homicide.
There have been several mass shootings in the country in recent years.
In 2016, a man killed five people in northern Serbia after opening fire in a cafe in Zitiste, a village northwest of Belgrade.
In 2015, a man shot and killed four people after his son’s wedding, including the gunman’s wife, his new daughter-in-law and her parents.
In 2013, a 60-year-old veteran of the Balkan wars shot and killed 13 people, including relatives and neighbors, in the village of Velika Ivanca near Belgrade. In July 2007, a 38-year-old man fatally shot nine people who had been passing by on a street in the village of Jabukovac in eastern Serbia.
