AFP, PODGORICA
A gunman who opened fire at a restaurant in southern Montenegro killed a total of 12 people, including two children, a prosecutor said yesterday.
“Twelve people were killed of whom two were children,” up from a previous toll of at least 10 in Wednesday’s attack, prosecutor Andrijana Nastic told reporters in Cetinje.
Police launched an hours-long manhunt for the suspect, who “shot himself in the head” when he was surrounded, Police Chief Lazar Scepanovic told reporters.
Police officers and civil protection units secure a crime scene after a gunman killed several people in the village of Bajice, Montenegro, on Wednesday.
Photo: AFP
“An attempt was made to transport him to a clinical center, but he succumbed to his injuries in the meantime,” Scepanovic said.
In his killing spree, which started at about 5:30pm in Bajice village near Cetinje, the 45-year-old gunned down 12 people, two of whom were aged 10 and 13, police said.
Montenegrin Minister of the Interior Danilo Saranovic said he had also “killed members of his own family”.
“A terrible tragedy has struck all of us in Cetinje, in the village of Bajice,” Montenegrin Prime Minister Milojko Spajic said.
Four people were also seriously wounded and transported to a hospital in the capital, Podgorica, although Scepanovic later said their lives were “no longer in danger.”
The suspect “had consumed alcoholic beverages all day” before the incident between him and another restaurant guest, Scepanovic said, adding that he then “went home, took a weapon, used firearms and killed four people at one location,” and then went to three other places.
The government declared three days of national mourning from yesterday.
An earlier police statement had identified the shooter as “AM, 45,” ruling out a “showdown between organized criminal groups,” and said that the firearms used were illegal.
Spajic said the incident was a “restaurant fight” gone wrong and that he would be tightening the country’s criteria for firearms possession.
“It was simply a restaurant fight where guns were drawn and everything went in a different direction in which it should not have gone,” he said. “This is a tragedy after which we must ask ourselves who should be allowed to possess firearms in Montenegro.”
Police had sealed off the area surrounding the restaurant, a photographer said. Dozens of officers, police vehicles and at least one ambulance were at the scene.
Montenegrin President Jakov Milatovic said he was “shocked and shaken by this tragedy that has cast a shadow over our Cetinje.
“Our thoughts tonight are with the families who lost their loved ones and the citizens of Cetinje,” Milatovic wrote on social media. “The whole of Montenegro feels and shares your pain. We pray and hope for the recovery of all the wounded.”
According to the Small Arms Survey (SAS), a Swiss research program, there are about 245,000 firearms in circulation in Montenegro, but mass shootings are rare in the Balkan nation of more than 620,000 people.
In 2022, a man murdered 10 Cetinje residents, including two children, in broad daylight before being killed. It was one of the deadliest such incidents to rock the Balkan country.
Organized crime and corruption have remained two major issues plaguing Montenegro, which authorities have pledged to tackle under pressure from the EU that the tiny nation aspires to join.
