Serbia in shock for two massacres with gunshots that took place just a week apart.

The police also arrested the grandfather and uncle of Uros B., with whom the 21-year-old author of the new massacre last night had hidden. In their home, in Vinjista, near Kragujevac (150 km south of Belgrade), the police found bombs, an automatic rifle and ammunition. The same house where a few hours earlier the young multiple murderer had been tracked down and arrested, who late yesterday evening, shooting madly from a car driven by an accomplice, killedeight people in some villages around Mladenovac, a town about sixty kilometers south of the capital. Among the victims of the second massacre in the village of Malo Orasje, according to some testimonies, there would be a police officer and his sister. The killer, after the massacre, stopped a taxi driver in Mladenovac and at gunpoint ordered him to take him to Vinjista.

The brutal manner of the shooting throws panic and strong concern among the population and the authorities: only last Wednesday in a school in the center of Belgrade, a thirteen-year-old, Kosta K., with his father's gun, made nine deaths, including eight students and a security guard and wounded 6 other boys and a teacher.

(GettyImages)

Serbia, crime scene investigator in the village of Dubona, near Mladenovac

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has promised a crackdown on illegal weapons in the country by launching a large-scale disarmament plan to eliminate thousands of weapons from the country. "We will do an almost complete disarmament of Serbia," he told a news conference. The plan also aims to "disarm" the population already in possession of weapons with sweep controls on those recorded up to the shooting ranges, very popular in Serbia.


For Vucic "it is a mass criminal attack, an attack on our country". The head of the BIA intelligence agency, Aleksandar Vulin spoke of "acts of terrorism", while the police use helicopters for patrols on the territory. For the plan that begins with the recruitment in the police force to guard the schools, he has allocated 25 million euros. "We want to increase security by 99% and reduce violence by 80%. In Belgrade there are 331 schools, and there will be 331 policemen in them." Then periodic checks, medical examinations and psychiatric and drug tests, measures with which "we expect that there will be no more than 30,40-<>,<> weapons left around. We will double the penalties, and then we will see who buys weapons again," the president said, promising a hard fist even for hunters.

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Aleksandar Vučić

From a research published in recent days it emerged that Serbia is in third place in the world, after the USA and Montenegro, for the incidence of weapons per hundred inhabitants: 39 out of a hundred civilians are armed, more than 760,000 weapons out of about 6.8 million inhabitants. Very high rates of arms ownership are also recorded in the other countries of the former Yugoslavia - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia - a clear result of the large amount of weapons and ammunition that remained in circulation in the region after the armed conflicts of the nineties.

(LaPresse)

Serbia - New attack with several dead in a village in Dubona, near Belgrade

Health Minister Danica Grujicic visited the injured in hospital, noting that 7 out of a total of 13 are in serious condition. The Belgrade school boy not yet 14 years old, by law not prosecuted, is under observation in a neuropsychiatric care center. Both his parents have been arrested, and his father, a well-known doctor in the capital, will be heard by the judges.

From today until Sunday, national mourning has been proclaimed. Flags across the country are at half-mast, most public events have been cancelled, and thousands of people continue to make pilgrimages to the Vladislav Ribnikar school in the centre of the capital to lay flowers and light candles in memory of the young victims.

AFP

Belgrade, after the massacre at the Belgrade school