The incident followed two mass shootings in neighboring Serbia, suggesting that violence has normalized in the Balkans.
A teacher has been injured after being shot dead by a former student at a school in the Bosnian city of Lukavac.
“The child, under the age of 14, is under police supervision at the premises of the Lukavac police station, where guns and other discarded items have been secured until the investigation begins,” the Tuzla State Ministry of the Interior said on Wednesday.
According to Bosnian Education Minister Ahmet Omerovic, the attacker was a former student of the school who was transferred to another school as “disciplinary action”.
The injured teacher, identified as Ismet Osmanovic, who taught English at the school, was intubated and underwent surgery, according to a statement from the Tuzla University Clinical Centre.
“The operation is still ongoing. The doctor told me he is in stable condition,” Osmanovic’s father told local media.
Serbia mass shooting
Wednesday’s school shooting followed two separate mass shootings in two days in neighboring Serbia last month that killed at least 17 people, including eight children.
After school shootings in Serbia last month, psychologist Marina Nadkin Simic said in an interview with Al Jazeera that school shootings were the country’s “red line”.
“Unfortunately, in our society, violence is pervasive and tolerated. In a way, it’s the normalization of violence…Those kids are used to living in such an environment, and among them Some of the people felt bad,” she said.
To add insult to injury, “many kids spend far more time online than in the real world,” leading to underdeveloped emotional and social skills, Nadejin Simic said.
Wednesday’s violence also reverberated in Bosnia, a Balkan country where about 31 out of every 100 citizens own a firearm, according to a report by the Small Arms Survey.
Much of these guns and other weapons were trafficked into the country as a result of an arms embargo during the war in the 1990s.
Authorities have been grappling with the issue since then to address gun violence.
Last month, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also stressed the importance of arms control in the western Balkans, Euronews Albania reported.
In a meeting with EU officials, he said: “We all know that this activity poses a huge threat to our peace and stability. It is a multifaceted threat that also increases the risk of terrorist attacks.”
The 27-member bloc has invested 38 million euros ($41 million) so far, focusing on gun control in the western Balkans.
