At least three staff members have been killed in a shooting at a school in the northwest of Bosnia and Herzegovina, authorities say.
“Police were notified at 10:15 a.m. that a man had opened fire at the school with an automatic rifle, the police spokesman for Una-sana canton”, Adnan Beganovic, said.
“The shooter used a military firearm, an automatic rifle, to kill three school employees and tried to kill himself and was gravely injured. Those killed were the school dean, the secretary and a teacher”, Beganovic said. He added that the suspect was transferred for emergency treatment in the nearby town of Banja Luka. “An investigation is underway”, he said.
The school had not yet reopened from the summer holidays so no children were involved.
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Citing witnesses, said that a janitor who had a history of disagreements with the management and was under disciplinary proceedings, sought out specific people and shot them. Police are yet to provide a motive for the attack.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in the Western Balkans which is awash with weapons that remained in private hands from wars in the 1990s. In July, a war veteran in neighboring Croatia shot five people including his mother in a nursing home and wounded six others.
According to a 2010 study by the United Nations Development Programme there were about 750,000 weapons in illegal possession in Bosnia.
Recall that the last school shooting in the Balkans took place in May 2023 in Belgrade, Serbia, when a teenager shot dead 10 people, including nine classmates.
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