A man opened fire on the streets of a western Montenegrin town on Friday, killing 10 people, including two children, before being shot dead by a passerby, authorities said.
Montenegrin police chief Zoran Brdjanin said in a video statement shared with the media that the attacker was a 34-year-old man identified only by his initials, VB.
Brdjanin said the man used a hunting rifle to first shoot two children aged eight and 11 and their mother, who lived as tenants in the attacker’s house in the Medovina neighborhood of Cetinje.
Police investigators at the scene of the attack in Cetinje, 36 kilometers west of Podogrica, Montenegro. (AP)
The shooter then went outside and randomly shot 13 more people, seven of them dead, the chief said.
“At the moment, it is unclear what caused VB to commit this heinous act,” Brdjanin said.
Andrijana Nastic, the prosecutor coordinating the crime scene investigation, told reporters that the gunman was killed by a passerby and that a police officer was among the injured.
He said nine of the dead died at the scene and two died at a hospital where they were taken for surgery.
Cetinje, the seat of Montenegro’s former royal government, is 36 kilometers west of Podogrica, the current capital of the small Balkan nation.
A man in Montenegro shot himself after a family dispute, killing 10 people on the streets of a city before being shot dead in a shootout with police. (AP)
Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic wrote on his Telegram channel that the incident was “an unprecedented tragedy” and urged the nation “to be, in your thoughts, with the families of the innocent victims, their relatives, friends and all the people of Cetinje”.
President Milo Djukanovic said on Twitter that he was “deeply moved by the news of the terrible tragedy” in Cetinje and called for “solidarity” with the families who lost loved ones in the incident.
This is considered to be one of the rainiest places on Earth