A 13-year-old boy opened fire in his Belgrade classroom on Wednesday morning, shooting dead eight fellow pupils and a security guard in a pre-planned attack and injuring seven others, Serbian officials say.
Key points:
Police received a call about the shooting in the Vladislav Ribnikar primary school
A seventh-grade student has been arrested
An investigation into the motives behind the attack is under way
Using his father's handgun, the boy fired first at the security guard and three girls in the hallway and then entered a history class and shot at the teacher and classmates, police said.
The teacher and six pupils were hospitalised, some with life-threatening injuries.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws and has issued several amnesties for owners to hand in or register illegal guns.
But the western Balkans are awash with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following wars and unrest in the 1990s.
Me: the main problem is easy access to guns.. be they hand guns or machineguns (or the preferred instrument of killers the AR style) - yes this killer had 2 hand guns and a petrol bomb - but the petrol bomb isn't described as the cause of the deaths/injuries
