DUBONA, Serbia — The
Gunman raced through the villages on the outskirts of Belgrade in a car, firing what appeared to be an automatic rifle at those he passed: a
police officer, his sister and six other people who came into his sights. The shooter, 21 years old and wearing a T-shirt with a white supremacist symbol on it, officials said, was finally caught early Friday after an overnight manhunt involving hundreds of police officers and helicopters swarming overhead. Eight people were killed and at least 14 were wounded in the attacks late Thursday, the second mass
shooting in Serbia in two days, stunning a nation that has one of the world’s highest rates of gun ownership but where gun violence is rare. The Balkan country was already trying to come to grips with a deadly shooting the day before, when a seventh grader armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails killed eight of his classmates and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital. President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia on Friday vowed sweeping changes to Serbia’s gun laws, saying he was aiming for the “almost complete disarmament” of the country, which has the highest rate of gun ownership in Europe, partly a legacy of the wars that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. “We’ve been walking around like zombies the last 24 hours, looking for a reason something like this could happen,” Mr. Vucic said in a news conference, explaining his decision to take a stronger stance on gun control. An official three-day mourning period for the earlier shooting began on Friday, and Mr. Vucic announced that those would also be devoted to mourning the victims of the second shooting. The suspect in the second shooting was arrested near the city of Kragujevac, about 40 miles south of where the attacks began to the south of Belgrade, according to Serbian officials. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Generation 88” when arrested, Mr. Vucic said, adding that it referenced a for “Heil Hitler.” The president said the shooter gave a single-word reason for his rampage: “disrespect.” It was not clear if the shooter had connections to any white supremacist groups, and people who knew him in his village said they were unaware of any such affiliation. It was not clear how long the shootings lasted or exactly where they began. The gunman opened
fire near a schoolyard in the village of Dubona, killing three people, and fatally shot five others on the outskirts of a neighboring village, Malo Orasje, according to relatives of the victims and local residents. Mr. Vucic confirmed that the gunman was responsible for attacks in both areas. Both villages are near the small city of Mladenovac. Nikola Mitrovic, one of those wounded in the shooting in Malo Orasje, said he was hanging out with 10
Friends on a small soccer field, drinking and listening to
music, when the gunman pulled up in a black Mercedes car around 10:30 p.m. “We thought that somebody was making a joke on us,” Mr. Mitrovic, 17, said by telephone from the hospital where he was being treated. “He started yelling ‘Get on the ground!’ ” “He fired in bursts and whoever he hit, he hit,” Mr. Mitrovic said, adding that he managed to escape as the gunman reloaded. Many Serbs have stockpiled weapons left over from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the country has long had high levels of gun ownership compared with other countries. But Serbia has not had high levels of gun violence, according to , an independent research group. Serbia ranks third in the world, tied with Montenegro, after the
United States and
Yemen in civilian firearm ownership, with an estimated 39 per 100 people, according to a , a group based in Geneva. The United States has about 120 guns per 100 people. By The
New York Times Mr. Vucic called Thursday’s shooting a “terrorist act” and said he would introduce stricter
gun control measures, harsher fines for illegal arms and a stronger police presence in schools. Serbia would increase its police force by 1,200 officers over the next six months, with one officer in every school while classes are in session, he said. The new gun control measures would include a full audit, including psychological and drug tests, of all legal gun owners. The Interior Ministry would give gun owners a one-month grace period to surrender illegal arms. Of the roughly 400,000 legal, registered guns in Serbia, excluding hunting weapons, Mr. Vucic said he expected just 10 percent, at most, to remain in the hands of citizens once his planned changes came into effect. He did not specify how he would do that. Jail time for possessing unregistered firearms would increase by up to 15 years, depending on the circumstances, Mr. Vucic said. Although the president in Serbia is officially a ceremonial figure, Mr. Vucic holds considerable influence because he has a lock on the country’s governing party and has . It remains unclear whether the sweeping changes he called for on Friday will be quickly put in place. But the Serbian government has a record of acting on the president’s suggestions. On Thursday, just a day after Mr. Vucic suggested a series of measures to better regulate guns, the government announced it would enact some of them immediately. On Friday morning, large blood stains were still visible on a road in front of the schoolyard in Dubona, a small village where vineyards extend through hilly landscapes, where the gunman had shot two people. “It’s a shock,” said Javorka Pavlovic, a resident of the village, as she stood close to where one of the shootings occurred. Ms. Pavlovic said she heard the gunshots late in the night but thought that they were fireworks. Zlatko Vujic said his 25-year-old nephew was among those shot dead in Dubona by the gunman. Mr. Vujic said the suspect, whom he knew, had been working at a nearby fruit farm. The gunman “was just a kid,” Mr. Vujic said, his voice quavering. Mr. Vujic said the gunman’s father had served in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Mr. Vucic also said that the gunman’s father is a deputy colonel in the Serbian Army. The villages where the attacks took place are sparsely populated suburbs on the southern edge of Belgrade, near the slopes of Mount Kosmaj. After initially searching in darkness with thermal imaging cameras, the police began a physical search as dawn broke, RTS reported. Police officers and army officials on Friday morning surrounded the house of the gunman’s family in the tiny village of Donja Dubona, near Dubona. Stefan Markovic, 29, a resident of Donja Dubona who said he had known the gunman since they were children, said the gunman’s father had kept numerous weapons in the house. He described a family wedding he attended a few years ago, in which the suspect’s father and other family members shot rifles into the air to celebrate. The Serbian police on Friday that officers had searched a cottage used by the suspect in Sepsin, where they found a cache of weapons including a pistol, a hunting knife and 25 pieces of carbine ammunition. During the search of the house and the adjacent village, the police found four hand grenades, several boxes of pistol ammunition and an automatic rifle without a factory number. Mr. Vucic’s pledge to tighten gun laws came a day after the Serbian government approved a series of measures, including a two-year moratorium on new licenses and enhanced surveillance of shooting ranges. Those measures came into effect in response to Wednesday’s attack, when a seventh-grade student fatally and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, plunging the capital into grief. “There isn’t a mother who slept in the last 24 hours in Serbia,” Mr. Vucic said. He promised increased vigilance by the authorities in the coming two weeks. The Interior Ministry gun owners to ensure that their weapons were locked away, unloaded and separated from ammunition. The ministry said it would go through the registry of gun owners to check that arms were properly stored and seize weapons or take other actions against owners if they were not. From 2015 through 2019, 125 people were killed in firearm-related homicides in Serbia, a country of about seven million people, according to the Flemish Peace Institute report. Serbia has enacted on firearms since guns became widely available during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Gun owners must have no history of imprisonment and have no criminal record in the past four years, be trained in handling firearms, undergo routine medical examinations, and have a safe storage space. Serbia’s last mass shooting occurred in , when a man killed five people at a cafe in the country’s north. In 2015, a man killed six people after his son’s wedding, including his wife, his new daughter-in-law and her parents. Constant Méheut reported from Dubona. Victoria Kim , Matej Leskovsek and John Yoon reported from Seoul. Joe Orovic contributed reporting from Zadar, Croatia, and Jenny Gross from
London.