A 14-year-old boy shot his teacher in a Belgrade classroom on Wednesday morning before opening fire on other students and security guards, killing at least one person and wounding five, police and witnesses said.
Milan Milosevic, the father of one of the pupils at the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school, said his daughter was in the classroom when the shooting began.
“She managed to escape. [The boy] … first shot the teacher and then he started shooting randomly,” Milosevic told broadcaster N1. Nova TV, another broadcaster, said the teacher had died. Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.
Police said a security guard was killed and five students were wounded, and that a seventh-grade student had been arrested.
“I saw the security guard lying under the table. I saw two girls with blood on their shirts. They say he [the shooter] was quiet and a good pupil,” added Milosevic, who had rushed to the school after the shooting.
Officers in helmets and bulletproof vests cordoned off the area around the school in the central Vracar neighbourhood.
“I saw kids running out from the school, screaming. Parents came, they were in panic. Later I heard three shots,” a girl who attends a high school adjacent to Vladislav Ribnikar told state TV RTS.
Casualties were being treated and an investigation into the motives behind shooting was under way, police said in a statement, without elaborating.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws. But the western Balkans are awash with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following wars and unrest in the 1990s.
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Serbian authorities have issued several amnesties for owners to hand in or register illegal guns.
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