Serbian president vows to 'practically disarm' country after shootings

Forensic police operates on a car in the village of Dubona (AP)

Serbia’s president has said the gunman in the latest mass shooting to hit the country targeted people at random and vowed to 'disarm' his country in response to the attack.

Aleksandar Vucic said the assailant shot at people “wherever they were”, and branded the assault an attack on the whole country.

The gunman killed eight people and wounded 14 others in three Serbian villages south of Belgrade on Thursday, authorities and media reported. Police arrested a suspect on Friday following an all-night manhunt.

The shooting came a day after a 13-year-old boy used his father’s guns to kill eight fellow pupils and a guard at a school in Belgrade, the capital.

Mr Vucic vowed to the nation in an address that the suspect in the shooting “will never again see the light of the day”.

The populist leader called the shooting a terrorist attack, as is typical in Serbia.

He announced a series of “anti-terrorist” measures, including the hiring of 1,200 policemen and putting a police officer on guard each day at schools.

Reports said that the suspect in the latest shooting, identified by initials UB, was arrested near the central Serbian town of Kragujevac, about 60 miles south of Belgrade.

Reports of the arrest followed an all-night search by hundreds of officers, who sealed off an area south of Belgrade where the shooting took place late on Thursday.

The attacker shot randomly at people in three villages near Mladenovac, some 30 miles south of the capital, broadcaster RTS said.

Serbian interior minister Bratislav Gasic called Thursday’s drive-by shootings “a terrorist act”.

This week’s bloodshed sent shockwaves through a Balkan nation scarred by wars, but unused to mass murders.

Though Serbia is awash with weapons left over from the wars of the 1990s, Wednesday’s school shooting was the first in the country’s modern history.

The last mass shooting before this week was in 2013, when a war veteran killed 13 people in a central Serbian village.

Serbia spent much of Thursday reeling from its first mass shooting in 10 years. Students, many wearing black and carrying flowers, filled the streets around the school in central Belgrade as they paid silent tribute to the dead.

Serbian teachers’ unions announced protests and strikes to warn about a crisis in the school system and to demand changes.

President Vucic proposed an array of measures to improve gun control and bolster security in schools.

He suggested a moratorium on gun permits regardless of weapons type, in what he called a "practical disarmament" of Serbia, along with more frequent medical and psychological checks of gun owners.

The government would also hire 1,200 new police officers to improve security in schools, said Vucic, who wore a dark suit.

"There will be justice. These monsters will never see the light of the day, neither the little monster nor the little older monster," he said, referring respectively to the suspected gunmen from Wednesday and Thursday.

Vucic said he had proposed the reintroduction of the death penalty but said the government was against such a step.

The shooting on Wednesday morning in Vladislav Ribnikar primary school also left seven people in hospital – six children and a teacher. One girl who was shot in the head remains in life-threatening condition, and a boy is in serious condition with spinal injuries, doctors said on Thursday morning.

Authorities have said the shooter, whom police identified as Kosta Kecmanovic, is too young to be charged and tried. He has been placed in a mental institution, while his father has been detained on suspicion of endangering public security because his son got hold of the guns.

Gun culture is widespread in Serbia and elsewhere in the Balkans: The region has among the highest numbers of guns per capita in Europe. Guns are often fired into the air at celebrations and the cult of the warrior is part of national identities.

Experts have repeatedly warned of the danger posed by the number of weapons in the highly divided country, where convicted war criminals are glorified and violence against minority groups often goes unpunished.

They also note that decades of instability stemming from the conflicts of the 1990s, as well as ongoing economic hardship, could trigger such outbursts.

 - additional reporting by Reuters