CNN — A 14-year-old boy opened fire in his prestigious school in the Serbian capital Belgrade on Wednesday morning, killing eight children and a security guard and seriously injuring several others, according to officials.
The rare and shocking incident prompted panic among parents at the school, many of whom gathered outside the facility and were desperately trying to reach their children.
Seven girls and one boy were killed, alongside the security guard, Belgrade’s Police Chief Veselin Milić said at a press conference.
The suspect opened fire in a history classroom, “because it was near the entrance of the school,” he added. The teenager then called the police himself and waited to be arrested in the schoolyard, Milić said.
A further six children and one teacher have been hospitalized, according to Serbia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The alleged shooter was later filmed being taken from the school in handcuffs with a jacket over his head and wearing blue, skinny jeans. He was flanked by police officers and driven away in an unmarked police car.
Nearby, parents struggled to come to terms with the shooting, which shook the country on Wednesday. The father of one student said he ran to the school to look for his daughter after seeing police at the scene, according to CNN affiliate N1.
“My child is still in shock, full of adrenaline, we haven’t been able to calm her down,” a mother of one child told N1.
Another father recounted a chaotic morning. “I was heading to the bank, and I saw a bunch of police. That was around 8:50. I came running. I saw the school psychologist, I saw the school staff, the teachers who were in shock,” the father told N1.
“The police came quickly, from what I could see. I asked: ‘Where’s my kid?’ And allegedly, one man said that the history teacher was shot. I went back to my apartment to look at my child’s schedule, and she was actually in history class. I took my wife with me and we went back out on the street,” he said.
“I saw that the security guard was lying under a table, in a circle [of blood?] I went through the door looking for an attendant. I didn’t know what to do. I asked ‘Where’s my kid?’ and no one was saying anything,” the father said.
The man later learned that his daughter had escaped unharmed.
The interior ministry said in a statement on Facebook that it was informed at 8.40 a.m. local time (2.40 a.m. ET) that a school shooting had occurred at the Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School, a well-known institution in Vračar, an upscale area of the Serbian capital.
“All available police patrols were dispatched to the scene, where they immediately went onto the school grounds and apprehended a minor, a seventh-grader who is suspected to have fired several shots from his father’s gun at students and the school security guard,” the statement said.
A schoolgirl injured in the shooting has life-threatening wounds and was undergoing surgery, N1 reported.
“The wounded are being administered medical care, while the police work to establish the facts and circumstances that led to this incident,” the ministry statement said.
“All police forces are still on the ground and are intensively working to shed light on all the facts and circumstances that led to this tragedy,” it added.
Serbia has a high level of gun ownership following its conflict with Kosovo in the 1990s; a 2018 study found that the country has the third highest level of gun ownership in the world, tied with Montenegro and behind only the US and Yemen.
But the country has strict gun laws and has issued amnesties for owners to hand in or register illegal firearms, meaning that mass shootings are comparatively rare, according to Reuters.
