WEB DESK
At least eight people were killed and 13 injured in a shooting near Belgrade yesterday. The shooting comes a day after nine people were shot dead at an elementary school in the Serbian capital. An attacker armed with an automatic weapon opened fire from a moving vehicle before fleeing, the interior ministry said in a statement.
A heavy security presence was deployed while helicopters buzzed over the area. Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic called the shooting a terrorist act, Serbian news portal Telegraf reported. The Balkan nation is already reeling from a rare deadly school shooting on Wednesday when a 13-year-old student killed eight peers and a security guard at the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school in downtown Belgrade.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws, but gun ownership in the country is among the highest in Europe. The western Balkans are awash with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following wars and unrest in the 1990s. In 2019, it was estimated that there are 39.1 firearms per 100 people in Serbia – the third highest in the world, behind the US and Montenegro.