A teenager opened fire Wednesday morning at a school in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, killing eight children and a school guard.
Six other children and a teacher were wounded and hospitalized, according to police reports.
Authorities identified the gunman by his initials, K.K., age 15. The boy, who allegedly used his father’s gun, was later arrested in the schoolyard.
The motive for the massacre remains unclear. The young man, according to initial reports, was a “good student” who had recently joined the class.
Mass shootings are relatively rare in Serbia, which like many other countries in the area has very strict laws on gun ownership. Nevertheless, the entire Western Balkan region is teeming with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons as a result of the wars and unrest of the 1990s.
