In the last few hours, more details have emerged about the armed attack carried out on Wednesday morning in a school in Belgrade, Serbia, in which eight students and a security guard were killed.
The attack was carried out by a thirteen-year-old student of the school, Kosta Kecmanovic, who was carrying two pistols stolen from his father and two Molotov cocktails, which he did not use. The boy gave himself up spontaneously after the attack: he called the police on the phone confessing to the murders, and was arrested shortly after in the schoolyard. He will not go to jail but will be hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic, given that under Serbian law – as under Italian law – minors under the age of 14 are not liable for crimes.
The attack was carried out in the Vladislav Ribnikar school in central Belgrade. Police said they received a call to speak at around 8.40am, when classes had just started. Vladislav Ribnikar is a primary school, which in the Serbian school system is attended by children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 14. The class in which the attack occurred was a junior grade.
Kosta Kecmanovic entered the school and first shot a security guard and three girls who were in the hall. Then he entered a classroom where a history lesson was taking place and started shooting first at a teacher, who was seriously injured, and then at the students: in addition to the eight killed, he wounded six, including one girl who is hospitalized in serious condition.
Belgrade police said that a teenager who opened fire at a school in Serbia’s capital drew sketches of classrooms and wrote a list of people he intended to target in a meticulously planned attack.
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On Wednesday afternoon, the Serbian police chief, Veselin Milic, held a press conference in which he said that the first investigation into Kosta Kecmanovic revealed that the attack was not improvised, but prepared for at least a month. Milic said Kecmanovic had with him a set of papers in which he had drawn up a list of students he would have wanted to kill, as well as some drawings in which he had described how he would have wanted to carry out the attack.
The Serbian Interior Minister, Bratislav Gasic, said that the father had a regular license for possession of the two pistols and that these were kept in a safe, to which the boy would have had access, however. Kecmanovic’s father and mother were also arrested.