8 Dead in Shooting in Serbia, Day After School Massacre That Killed 9

Eight people were killed and at least 10 others wounded late Thursday near Belgrade, Serbia, in the nation’s second mass shooting in as many days, The Associated Press reported, quoting Serbian media.

The shooting came a day after a seventh-grade student armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails ​shot and killed eight children and a security guard at his school in Belgrade, plunging the Serbian capital into grief and stunning the entire country.

Serbia has traditionally had a high level of gun ownership compared with other countries because of its recent history of armed conflict, and a cultural and historical tradition of owning guns, but it does not have high levels of gun violence, according to an October 2022 report by the Flemish Peace Institute, an independent research group.

But there have been several mass shootings in recent years: In 2016, a man killed five people at a cafe in northern Serbia. In 2015, a man killed four people after his son’s wedding, including his wife, his new daughter-in-law and her parents. In 2013, a 60-year-old veteran of the Balkan wars killed 13 people, including relatives and neighbors, in the village of Velika Ivanca near Belgrade. And, in July 2007, a 38-year-old man killed nine people who had been passing by on a street in the village of Jabukovac in eastern Serbia.