SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina (AP) — Police say a school employee shot and killed three teachers in a town in northwestern Bosnia on Wednesday. The gunman was critically wounded after trying to kill himself.
The shooting occurred at around 10 a.m. in a secondary school building in Sanski Most, some 300 kilometers (186 miles) northwest of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, regional police spokesman Adnan Beganovic said.
The man used “a military weapon, an automatic rifle,” Beganovic told The Associated Press. He later tried to commit suicide and was in critical condition at a hospital in the nearby town of Banja Luka.
The victims were the school principal, a secretary and a teacher, the spokesman added.
Regional broadcaster N1 reported that the man was involved in a dispute with the school management. Among the victims was an English teacher, according to news website Klix.
No further details were immediately available. Bosnian schools are closed for the summer holidays, but Beganovic said there were people at the centre because of the re-evaluation exams.
The Balkan region has been littered with weapons of various calibre since the wars of the 1990s, during the break-up of Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia, which has some 3.5 million inhabitants. According to a 2010 study by the United Nations Development Programme, there are some 750,000 illegally possessed weapons in Bosnia.
Last month, a veteran killed six people and wounded six others after opening fire at a nursing home in a quiet town in central Croatia.
In Serbia, a teenager killed nine children and a guard at a school in May with his father’s guns, and the next day a 20-year-old gunman killed another nine people and wounded 12 outside Belgrade, the Serbian capital.
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2024-08-22 09:45:55