SW News: A boy studying in Grade Seven killed eight students and a security guard by spraying bullets inside an elementary school in the Serbian capital of Belgrade on Wednesday, May 3.

News agencies said the incident took place in the morning and one teacher was left with bullet injuries. According to the interior ministry, police rushed to the school and arrested the minor.

The interior ministry issued a statement saying, "The police sent all available patrols immediately to the spot and arrested a suspected minor - a seventh-grade student who is suspected of firing several shots from his father's gun in the direction of students and school security." Serbian official broadcaster RTS quoted a student as saying that kids came running from the school screaming in terror. The student later heard three gunshots.

According to the broadcaster, a student who knew the assailant described the boy as someone quiet who “looked nice”.  “He was having good grades, but we didn’t know much about him," the student told RTS. “He was not so open with everybody. Surely I wasn’t expecting this to happen."

The incident has shocked the country and the Serbian diaspora around the world as there have been very few similar incidents unlike the United States, which has a history of mass shootings in schools. Even in the nearby Balkan region there have been no such incidents in the recent past.

The last time Serbia witnessed something similar was in 2013 when a war veteran mowed down 13 people in a village in the central part of the country. Although mass shootings are highly infrequent in Serbia, experts have a word of caution because there are still a large number of weapons and ammunition in the country which are left over from the devastating war of the 1990s which led to the Balkanization of the erstwhile Yugoslavia.

The instability of the country over the decades coupled with the economic crisis could be potential triggers for such ghastly attacks.