Belgrade: A 13-year-old who shot dead eight fellow students and a security guard at a school in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, made a “kill list” and had planned the attack for weeks, according to police.
The suspect, who is alleged to have used his father’s guns — both of which had legal permits, was arrested shortly after the Wednesday morning attack at the Vladislav Ribnikar primary school in central Belgrade, reports the BBC.
His parents have also been arrested.
In a statement, the police said the boy had suspect planned the attack a month in advance and that he had carried a “priority list” of children to target and which classrooms he would go into first.
Most of the victims were born in 2009 — meaning they were either 13 or 14 years of age.
The accused even called the police after the murders as he felt it was right to do so, reported Associated Press.
The motive for the attack, which also led to the injuries of six students and a teacher, is still being investigated, the police said, adding that the boy was said to have gone to a shooting range more than once with his father before the killings.
In a televised address to the nation on Wednesday night, President Aleksandar Vucic described the attack as “the most difficult day in the modern history of our country”.
He said the suspect would be sent to a psychiatric clinic but under current Serbian law, he cannot be held criminally responsible as he is under 14.
Vucic has suggested that the age of criminal liability may be lowered to 12 in the wake of the killings.
He has also proposed several other reforms, including an audit on firearms licences and a tightening of the rules around who can access shooting ranges.
A national three-day mourning period starting on Friday has been announced.
Mass shootings are comparatively rare in Serbia, which has very strict gun laws, but gun ownership in the country is among the highest in Europe.
The western Balkans are awash with hundreds of thousands of illegal weapons following wars and unrest in the 1990s. In 2019, it was estimated that there are 39.1 firearms per 100 people in Serbia – the third highest in the world, behind the US and Montenegro.
In the deadliest shooting since then, Ljubisa Bogdanovic killed 14 people in the central village of Velika Ivanca in 2013, and Nikola Radosavljevic killed nine and wounded five in the eastern village of Jabukovac in July 2007.
The man who stormed on to Michigan State University’s campus and shot three students to death before killing himself bought the ammunition fired during the attack only a few hours earlier, investigators announced on Thursday.
Additionally, authorities said, the murderer had no personal or professional connection to the school, making his motive a mystery to them, despite his leaving a note which – among other things – complained about feeling rejected and not having sex during the last decade.
Such details were contained in a statement from the police force at the university in East Lansing, Michigan, summarizing what officers have learned about 43-year-old Anthony McRae since he went on campus and killed students Arielle Anderson, Alexandria Verner and Brian Fraser.
The killer loaded at least 13 handgun magazines with 9mm ammunition that he bought shortly before 4.50pm on 13 February. He put one magazine each in two handguns that he bought legally a month apart around the fall of 2021 but never registered, the police’s statement said. He used a Michigan identification as well as a social security card for the purchases, which he could make lawfully once he was discharged from a probation stint that he served after pleading guilty in 2020 to a misdemeanor weapons charge.
In part illustrating how much devastation a gun-wielding intruder can inflict even when not armed with a rifle, officers concluded that McRae fired about 20 times while murdering Anderson, Varner and Fraser as well as critically wounding five others at two separate buildings once he entered Michigan State’s campus at about 8.20pm. He left campus and eluded police until about 11.50pm, when officers found him in the adjacent city of Lansing, minutes after they publicly released a surveillance photo of him and asked for help in tracking him down.
McRae shot himself as police approached and died by suicide, according to authorities, who used spent shell casings to determine how many shots the killer fired. He had a backpack with 10 loaded magazines and nearly 140 rounds of loose ammunition, along with a total of more than 20 rounds in the magazines in his pistols as well as a magazine in his coat’s chest pocket.
Officers found a handwritten note on McRae which was headlined “Why? Why? Why? I’ve been hurt,” according to a copy of the screed that was released in the police’s statement on Thursday. The note claimed that McRae staged the attack in coordination with others, but state and federal investigators have not found any evidence to suggest that was true.
The note also mentioned fatigue at “being rejected” and complained about not having had sex in 10 years. It doesn’t explicitly describe McRae as a believer of the misogynist involuntary celibate – or “incel” – movement, which is primarily online and blames women for proponents’ lack of sexual and social status.
But the rhetoric in the parts of the note certainly calls to mind the movement, which experts have linked to dozens of killings and less lethal attacks in the last decade, including the stabbing and shooting rampage that left six people dead in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014.
Investigators were also careful to note that McRae had not attended Michigan State, had not known anyone at the campus and had not applied to work there in recent history. A relative later told CNN that McRae toward the end of his life had been living either at his father’s home or in local shelters for the unhoused.
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“There is no conclusive motive as to why McRae targeted Michigan State University,” the statement from the school’s police force said.
The murders carried out by McRae came weeks before an intruder with two rifles and a handgun shot three nine-year-old students and three adult staffers to death at a Christian grade school in Nashville, Tennessee, on 27 March. Police shot dead the intruder in that case.
As of Thursday, the killings at Michigan State and Nashville’s Covenant school were among more than 170 mass shootings so far this year in the US, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The archive defines a mass shooting as any with four or more victims who are killed or wounded, not including the shooter.
The spate of mass shootings has reignited calls in some quarters for Congress to pass legislation aimed at holding firearms manufacturers liable for violence committed with their products as well as to require background checks for gun-related sales, among other measures.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Hale was under a doctor’s care for an undisclosed emotional disorder and was not known to police before the attack, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at the news conference.
If police had been told that Hale was suicidal or homicidal, “then we would have tried to get those weapons,” Drake said. “But as it stands, we had absolutely no idea who this person was or if (Hale) even existed.”
Tennessee does not currently have a “red flag” law, which lets police step in and take firearms away from people who threaten to kill.
Hale legally bought seven firearms from five local gun stores, Drake said. Three of them were used in Monday’s shooting. Police spokesperson Brooke Reese said Hale bought the guns between October 2020 and June 2022.
Hale’s parents believed their child had sold one gun and did not own any others, Drake said, adding that Hale “had been hiding several weapons within the house.”
Hale’s motive is unknown, Drake said. In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Drake said investigators don’t know what drove Hale but believe the shooter had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”
Drake, at Tuesday’s news conference, described “several different writings by Hale” that mention other locations and The Covenant School.
Asked at a Senate hearing whether the Justice Department would open an investigation into whether the shooting was a hate crime targeting Christians, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said federal officials were working with local police to identify a motive.
Police have released videos of the shooting, including edited surveillance footage that shows the shooter’s car driving up to the school, glass doors being shot out and the shooter ducking through one of them.
Additional video, from Officer Rex Engelbert’s bodycam, shows a woman meeting police outside as they arrive and telling them that all the children were locked down, “but we have two kids that we don’t know where they are.”
The woman then directs officers to Fellowship Hall and says people inside had just heard gunshots. Three officers, including Engelbert, search rooms one by one, holding rifles and announcing themselves as police.
The video shows officers climbing stairs to the second floor and entering a lobby area, followed by a barrage of gunfire and an officer yelling twice: “Get your hands away from the gun.” Then the shooter is shown motionless on the floor.
Police identified Engelbert, a four-year member of the force, and Michael Collazo, a nine-year member, as the officers who fatally shot Hale. The White House said President Joe Biden spoke separately Tuesday with Drake, Engelbert and Callazo to thank them for their bravery and quick response.
Police response times to school shootings have come under greater scrutiny after the attack in Uvalde, Texas, in which 70 minutes passed before law enforcement stormed the classroom. In Nashville, police have said 14 minutes passed from the initial call to when the suspect was killed, but they have not said how long it took them to arrive.
Surveillance video shows a time stamp of just before 10:11 a.m., when the attacker shot out the doors. Police said they got the call about a shooter at 10:13 a.m. The edited bodycam footage didn’t include time stamps. A police spokesperson didn’t respond to an email Tuesday asking when they arrived.
During the news conference, Drake did not answer a question directly about how many minutes it took police to arrive. At about 10:24 a.m., 11 minutes after the call was received, officers engaged the suspect, he said.
“There were police cars that had been hit by gunfire. As officers were approaching the building, there was gunfire going off,” Drake said.
Police have given unclear information on Hale’s gender. For hours Monday, police identified the shooter as a woman. Later in the day, the police chief said Hale was transgender. After the news conference, Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale identified.
In an email Tuesday, police spokesperson Kris Mumford said Hale “was assigned female at birth. Hale did use male pronouns on a social media profile.” Later Tuesday, at the news conference, Drake referred to Hale with female pronouns.
Authorities identified the dead children as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney. The adults were Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.
The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists a Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn profile says she has led the school since July 2016. Peak was a substitute teacher, and Hill was a custodian, according to investigators.
Koonce was remembered as someone who would run toward danger, not away from it.
“I guarantee you if there were kids missing (during the shooting), Katherine was looking for them,” friend Jackie Bailey said. “And that’s probably how she got in the way — just trying to do something for somebody else. She would give up her own life in order to save somebody else’s.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Washington: Three students and three adults were killed and several others injured in a gun attack at a school in US’ Tennessee state on Monday before the woman perpetrator was shot dead by the police, reports said.
The attack was reported from the Covenant School in Nashville, a private Christian school for students in pre-school to sixth grade, when the students are roughly 11 or 12 years old, the BBC reported.
Local media, citing sources at the local Vanderbilt University Medical Center, reported that three children were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds and were pronounced dead.
Nashville police said they had “engaged” the shooter, who is now dead.
Later, Nashville police said in a briefing that six people have been killed – three children and three adults – and there are no additional victims. No additional details were provided.
The shooter was a female, the police said, and believed to be in her teens. Her name has not been released. She was armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun, they said.
The police said that they first received reports of an active shooter at 10.13 a.m. (local time, 8.43 p.m. IST), engaged with the shooter in a “lobby-like area” on the school’s second floor and managed to neutralise her by 10.27 a.m. local time.
According to its website, the school has approximately 200 students.
The victims were identified as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all 8 or 9 years old, and adults Cynthia Peak, 61; Katherine Koonce, 60; and Mike Hill, 61.
The website of The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school founded in 2001, lists a Katherine Koonce as the head of the school. Her LinkedIn profile says she has led the school since July 2016.
Police gave unclear information on the gender of the shooter. For hours, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually identified the person as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale currently identified.
The attack at The Covenant School — which has about 200 students from preschool through sixth grade, as well as roughly 50 staff members — comes as communities around the nation are reeling from a spate of school violence, including the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year; a first grader who shot his teacher in Virginia; and a shooting last week in Denver that wounded two administrators.
“I was literally moved to tears to see this and the kids as they were being ushered out of the building,” Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said at an afternoon news conference.
Drake did not give a specific motive when asked by reporters but gave chilling examples of the shooter’s prior planning for the targeted attack.
“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”
The Covenant School was founded as a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church. The affluent Green Hills neighborhood just south of downtown Nashville, where the Covenant School is located, is home to the famed Bluebird Café – a beloved spot for musicians and song writers.
President Joe Biden, speaking at an unrelated event at the White House on Monday, called the shooting a “family’s worst nightmare” and implored Congress again to pass a ban on certain semi-automatic weapons.
“It’s ripping at the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of this nation,” Biden said.
There have been seven mass killings at K-12 schools since 2006 in which four or more people were killed within a 24-hour period, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. In all of them, the shooters were males.
The database does not include school shootings in which fewer than four people were killed, which have become far more common in recent years. Just last week alone, for example, school shootings happened in Denver and the Dallas-area within two days of each other.
Monday’s tragedy unfolded over roughly 14 minutes. Police received the initial call about an active shooter at 10:13 a.m.
Officers began clearing the first story of the school when they heard gunshots coming from the second level, police spokesperson Don Aaron said during a news briefing.
Two officers from a five-member team opened fire in response, fatally shooting the suspect at 10:27 a.m., Aaron said. One officer had a hand wound from cut glass.
Aaron said there were no police officers present or assigned to the school at the time of the shooting because it is a church-run school.
Other students walked to safety Monday, holding hands as they left their school surrounded by police cars, to a nearby church to be reunited with their parents.
Rachel Dibble, who was at the church as families found their children, described the scene as everyone being in “complete shock.”
“People were involuntarily trembling,” said Dibble, whose children attend a different private school in Nashville. “The children … started their morning in their cute little uniforms, they probably had some Froot Loops and now their whole lives changed today.”
Dr. Shamendar Talwar, a social psychologist from the United Kingdom who is working on an unrelated mental health project in Nashville, raced to the church as soon as he heard news of the shooting to offer help. He said he was one of several chaplains, psychologists, life coaches and clergy inside supporting the families.
“All you can show is that the human spirit that basically that we are all here together … and hold their hand more than anything else,” he said.
Jozen Reodica heard the police sirens and fire trucks blaring from outside her office building nearby. As her building was placed under lockdown, she took out her phone and recorded the chaos.
“I thought I would just see this on TV,” she said. “And right now, it’s real.”
From her office nearby, Kelly Stooksberry could see parents rushing to park their cars on the side of the road before sprinting to locate their children. She saw one woman fall to her knees and grab her chest.
“It was gut-wrenching,” she said.
Top legislative leaders announced Monday that the GOP-dominant Statehouse would meet briefly later in the evening and delay taking up any legislation.
“In a tragic morning, Nashville joined the dreaded, long list of communities to experience a school shooting,” Mayor John Cooper wrote on Twitter.
Nashville has seen its share of mass violence in recent years, including a Christmas Day 2020 attack where a recreational vehicle was intentionally detonated in the heart of Music City’s historic downtown, killing the bomber, injuring three others and forcing more than 60 businesses to close.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: Telangana government on Thursday handed over documents of plots in Hyderabad to world boxing champion Nikhat Zareen and shooter Esha Singh.
Documents of 600 square yards plots were handed over by Sports Minister V Srinivas Goud and Chief Secretary A Santhi Kumari at the Burgula Rama Krishna Rao Bhavan, Hyderabad.
Apart from them, Padma Shri awardee Kinnera player Darshanam Mogilaiah also received the documents for one of the plots in Hyderabad.
Telangana govt announced cash prize to Nikhat Zareen, Esha Singh
Last year, the Telangana government announced a cash prize of Rs 2 crore each to Nikhat Zareen for winning gold medal at World Boxing Championship and shooter Esha Singh for her superb performance at the recent ISSF Junior World Cup.
Apart from the cash prize, the government has decided to allot residential plots to the two sports persons at Banjara Hills or Jubilee Hills in Hyderabad.
Zareen, who hails from the Nizamabad district, became the fifth Indian woman boxer to win a gold medal at the world championship.
On May 19, she defeated Thailand’s Jitpong Jutamas in the 52-kg category to join the selected club of Indian women boxers.
Esha Singh won three gold medals in team events in the recently-concluded ISSF Junior World Cup in Germany.
Darshanam Mogulaiah also get award, plot in Hyderabad
The state government has also issued orders for a Rs 1 crore cash award to Darshanam Mogulaiah.
Last year, Mogulaiah received Padma Shri for his outstanding contribution to the arts.
Mogulaiah is from a Madiga family. He grew up in the Ausalikunta village of the Lingala mandal in Telangana’s Nagarkurnool district, along the stretches of the Nallamala forests. A fifth-generation kinnera artiste, Mogulaiah, 62, has been playing the instrument since the age of eight.
As per CMO, on the request of Mogulaiah, the government has taken a decision to allot a residential plot in B.N. Reddy Nagar colony.
