Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday announced a sweeping ‘disarmament’ plan aimed at recovering hundreds of thousands of weapons from residents of the Balkan country, following two shootings that this week left a total of 17 dead. , including eight students in a primary school.
“We are going to carry out an almost complete disarmament of Serbia,” Vucic told a live-streamed press conference hours after the second shooting in which a young man killed eight people in three unnamed villages. far from Belgrade.
Mr. Vucic announced a revision of the license to carry light weapons, in addition to the weapons possessed by hunters, the objective of which will be to reduce their number from some 400,000 to “no more than between 30,000 to 40,000”.
In this country of about 6.8 million inhabitants, people legally own more than 765,000 weapons, including some 360,000 hunting weapons, according to data presented by the head of state.
Mr. Vucic also announced that the government would also tackle the problem of illegal possession of weapons.
A large number of firearms have been circulating in the Balkans since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the bloody wars of the 1990s.
After a shooting on Wednesday in which a 13-year-old schoolboy killed his eight classmates and a caretaker of this establishment in the center of Belgrade, a young man Thursday evening killed eight people with an automatic weapon and injured fourteen others, in three villages of the region of Mladenovac, about sixty kilometers south of Belgrade.
The suspect was arrested Friday morning in the Kragujevac region (center), after a manhunt that lasted all night.
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