SarajevoThree staff members at a secondary school in the western Bosnian town of Sanski were killed on Wednesday when a school employee shot them and then tried to kill himself, police said. The shooter killed the school’s dean, secretary and a teacher, and was seriously wounded while trying to kill himself.
Police were informed at 10.15am local time that a man had opened fire at the school with an automatic rifle, said Adnan Beganovic, spokesman for Una-sana canton police. “He tried to commit suicide and was seriously injured,” Beganovic said, adding that the suspect was taken for emergency treatment in the nearby city of Banja Luka.
Fortunately, the school had not yet reopened after the summer holidays, so no children were involved. Local media reported that a janitor who had a history of disagreements with management and was undergoing disciplinary proceedings sought out certain people and shot them. He used a “military weapon, an automatic rifle” to kill the three employees.
According to the British newspaper Mirror, the gunman, identified locally as Mehemed Vukalić, is believed to have ambushed the teachers inside the Sanski Most gymnasium, the secondary school in the town in northwestern Bosnia. The bodies have been taken to the Sanski Most health centre, according to local reports. The shooter is expected to recover from his wounds.
The Balkan region has been awash with small arms and light weapons since the wars of the 1990s that were part of the breakup of Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia, a country of some 3.5 million people. According to a 2010 study by the United Nations Development Programme, there were some 750,000 illegally held weapons in Bosnia.
Despite this, mass shootings are relatively rare in the Western Balkans, with a few exceptions. In July, a war veteran in neighbouring Croatia shot dead five people, including his mother, in a nursing home and wounded six others. Before that, in May, a teenager in Serbia opened fire at a school with his father’s guns, killing nine children and a school guard. A day later, a 20-year-old gunman killed nine people and wounded 12 in a shooting outside Belgrade.
(with contributions from agencies)
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