Sarajevo: Three staff members of a high school in the western Bosnian town of Sanski were killed on Wednesday when a school employee shot them and then tried to commit suicide, according to police. The shooter killed the school dean, the secretary and a teacher, and was seriously injured while trying to kill himself.
Police were notified at 10.15 am (local time) that a man had opened fire at the school with an automatic rifle, said Adnan Beganovic, the police spokesman for Una-sana canton. “He tried to commit suicide and was gravely injured,” Beganovic said, adding that the suspect was transferred for emergency treatment in the nearby town of Banja Luka.
Fortunately, the school had not yet reopened from the summer holidays so no children were involved. Local media reported that a janitor who had a history of disagreements with the management and was under disciplinary proceedings, sought out specific people and shot them. He used a “military weapon – an automatic rifle” to kill the three staffers.
The gunman, named locally as Mehemed Vukalić, is understood to have ambushed the teachers inside the Sanski Most Gymnasium – the town’s secondary school in north-west Bosnia, according to the UK-based Mirror. The bodies have been transported to the Sanski Most Health Centre, according to local reports. The shooter is expected to recover from his injuries.
The Balkan region has been awash with small arms and weapons since the 1990s wars, part of the breakup of Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia, a country of about 3.5 million people. According to a 2010 study by the United Nations Development Program, there were about 750,000 weapons in illegal possession in Bosnia.
Despite this, mass shootings are comparatively 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. Prior to 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 shooter killed nine people and wounded 12 in a rampage outside Belgrade.
(with input from agencies)
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