At least eight students and a security guard are dead after a shooting at a school in Serbia’s capital Belgrade.
Another six pupils and a teacher were injured in the attack and have been taken to hospital, the interior ministry said in a statement.
Police arrested a 14-year-old student at the Vladislav Ribnikar school in central Belgrade in connection with Wednesday morning’s attack.
The suspect is alleged to have used his father’s gun, officials said.
An investigation into the motives behind the incident is under way.
Officers in helmets and bulletproof vests cordoned off the area around the school, located in the central Vracar neighborhood, shortly after 08:40 local time.
„The police sent all available patrols immediately to the spot and arrested a suspected minor ,a seventh grade student who is suspected of firing several shots from his father’s gun in the direction of students and school security,” the interior ministry said in a statement.
Local media broadcast images of what they said was the suspect being led away from the scene by police, with his hands cuffed and his head covered by a jacket.
Milan Milosevic, the father of one of the pupils at the school, said his daughter was in the class where the gun was fired and managed to escape.
The boy “ first shot the teacher and then he started shooting randomly,” Milosevic told broadcaster N1.
„I saw the security guard lying under the table. I saw two girls with blood on their shirts. They say he .. was quiet and a good pupil..”
Milan Nedeljkovic, mayor of the central Vracar district, said doctors were fighting to save the teacher’s life.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws. However, gun ownership in the country is among the highest in Europe.
There are hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following wars and unrest in Yugoslavia in the early the 1990s. In 2019, it was estimated that there are 39.1 firearms per 100 people in Serbia, the BBC reported.
