- By James Gregory in London and Slobodan Maricic in Belgrade
- BBC News
See: Belgrade shooting suspect arrested by police
A teenager who killed eight classmates and a security guard at a school in Serbia had planned the attack for weeks and had a “victim list”, police say.
The 13-year-old was arrested following Wednesday’s attack on the Vladislav Ribnikar Primary School in Belgrade.
The boy’s father and mother were also arrested.
Of those killed, seven were girls from the school, but the motive for the attack remains unclear.
Six other students and a teacher were injured in the shooting, four other boys and two girls.
A boy who was shot in the neck and chest reportedly suffered the most serious injuries, while a girl is in critical condition with a head injury.
Officers wearing helmets and bulletproof vests cordoned off the area around the school, located in the central district of Vracar, shortly after 8:40 a.m. (0640 GMT).
The suspect allegedly used his father’s weapons, both legally licensed. He also reportedly went to a shooting range several times with his father before the murders.
In a nationally televised address, President Aleksandar Vucic called the attack “the most difficult day in the modern history of our country.”
He said the suspect would be sent to a psychiatric clinic. According to current Serbian law, he cannot be held criminally responsible because he is under 14 years old.
Mr Vucic suggested the age of criminal responsibility could be lowered to 12 following the killings.
He also proposed several other reforms, including an audit on gun permits and tightening rules regarding access to shooting ranges.
Police said the suspect planned the attack a month in advance and had on him a “priority list” of children to target as well as which classes he would go to first.
Four of the injured, three boys and a girl, were stable and conscious Wednesday.
A teacher injured in the attack was also said to have undergone surgery and the health minister said on Tuesday that her life was in danger.
Most of the victims were born in 2009, which means they were 13 or 14 years old at the time of the incident.
A three-day period of national mourning beginning Friday was announced.
Tributes paid to victims of Wednesday’s shooting outside central Belgrade school
Parents’ cries could be heard in the streets around the school hours after the shooting.
Milan Milosevic, the father of one of the students at the school, said his daughter was in the classroom where the gun was fired and managed to escape.
“(The boy) first shot the teacher, then he started shooting randomly,” Mr Milosevic told the N1 channel.
“I saw the security guard lying under the table. I saw two girls with blood on their shirts. They say he (the shooter) was calm and a good student. He recently joined their class .”
“I saw children running out of the school screaming. The parents arrived, they were panicked. Later I heard three gunshots,” a student told Serbian public television RTS.
Mr Vucic said the suspect had become friends with the caretaker, described by one of the parents as “a man who loved children”.
Mass shootings are relatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws, but the country’s gun ownership rate is among the highest in Europe.
The Western Balkans are overflowing with illegal weapons as a result of wars and unrest in the 1990s. In 2019, there were an estimated 39.1 guns per 100 people in Serbia, the third highest rate in the world. world, behind the United States and Montenegro.
In the deadliest shooting since then, Ljubisa Bogdanovic killed 14 people in the central village of Velika Ivanca in 2013, and Nikola Radosavljevic killed nine and injured five in the eastern village of Jabukovac in July 2007.