On May 3, 2023, in the heart of Europe there was one of the worst massacres in a school, the perpetrator – who was under 14 years old – killed ten people. He was released because he was not indictable, but his parents were arrested. The trial of the parents of the boy who took the lives of nine pupils and a custodian, injuring numerous other people, opened today in Belgrade.
The 13-year-old, who was in the seventh year of primary school, had started shooting at 8.40 with his father’s gun, another weapon was found in the backpack. According to the investigators, the perpetrator of the massacre had planned his act for at least a month: he had a map of the school and a list of classmates to kill. It was he who called the police informing them that he had shot many people. The boy also had four Molotov cocktails.
The massacre caused outrage, condemnation and enormous shock throughout Serbia, re-proposing the problem of the enormous quantity of weapons still in circulation in the country and in the rest of the Balkans as a legacy of the armed conflicts of the 1990s. The young man is entrusted to the services of psychologists and social workers. In recent months the prosecutor’s office had requested a sentence of 12 years for the father and two and a half years for the mother, held responsible for not having guaranteed the necessary safety of the weapon kept at home. Also accused are the manager and an instructor of a shooting range in Belgrade, where the boy was taken by his father to practice shooting. Both were asked for three years in prison.
It wasn’t the first in Europe, but never at the hands of a little boy. In 1996 Thomas Hamilton, 43 years old, carried out a massacre at a school in Dunblane, IN Scotland. On March 13, he entered the town’s primary school and shot dead 16 children between the ages of 5 and 6, as well as their teacher. Accused in the past of pedophilia, Hamilton wanted to take revenge on society and, after completing the massacre, committed suicide. He had also written to the Queen to report that he was the victim of persecution.
The following year in Erfurt, in Germania, a 19-year-old boy carries out a massacre in his high school. Having failed twice and recently been expelled, the 19-year-old bursts in disguised as a ninja and armed with a gun. He kills 18 people, 14 of whom are professors, before committing suicide. In 2007, in Finland, an 18-year-old student opens fire in the high school where he is enrolled in Tuusula, near Helsinki, kills seven classmates and the director of the institute and then shoots himself. Similar dynamics for the attack that occurred the following year, again in Finland: in the city of Kauhajoki, university student Matti Saari shoots ten classmates and a professor, before turning the gun on himself.
In March 2009 the final number of deaths from the attack on the technical institute was 16 Winnenden carried out by a former student of just 17 years old, who graduated the year before. The boy took his own life, subsequently his father was accused of manslaughter because his son had used one of his father’s numerous weapons.