‘Quiet’ Serb in shooting rampage
War changed him, brother says
He went from house to house in the village at dawn, coldbloodedly gunning down his mother, his son, a two-yearold cousin and 10 other neighbours. Terrified residents said if a police patrol car hadn’t shown up, they all would have been dead.
Police said they knew of no motive yet in the carnage Tuesday that left six men, six women and a child dead in Velika Ivanca, a Serbian village 50 kilometres southeast of Belgrade.
After the rampage, police said suspect Ljubisa Bogdanovic, a 60-year-old who saw action in one of the bloodiest sieges of the Balkan wars, turned his gun on himself and his wife as authorities closed in. Both were in grave condition at a hospital in the Serbian capital.
In the small lush village surrounded by fruit trees, the suspect’s older brother Radmilo broke down in tears, unable to explain why the massacre had happened.
“Why did he do it? ... I still can’t believe it,” he said sobbing. “He was a model of honesty.
“As a child, he was a frightened little boy. I used to defend him from other children. He couldn’t even slaughter a chicken,” he said.
But he said his brother had changed after serving in the army during a brutal Serb-led offensive against the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in 1992 — the worst bloodshed during Croatia’s 1991-95 war for independence.
“The war had burdened him,” Radmilo, 62, said in an interview. “He used to tell me: God forbid you live through what I went through. ... Something must have clicked in his head for him to do this.”
Twelve people in the village were killed immediately between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. and one person died later in a Belgrade hospital, Serbian police chief Milorad Veljovic said.
“Most of the victims were shot while they were asleep,” Veljovic told reporters. “The most harrowing scene discovered by police was the bodies of a young mother and her twoyear-old son.”
Although such mass shootings are relatively rare in Serbia, weapons are readily available, mostly from the 1990s wars in the Balkans. Media reports said the suspect had a licence for the handgun and police said he had lost his job last year at a woodprocessing factory.
Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said the killings showed the government must pay more attention to gun control and other social problems facing the Balkan nation, which is still reeling from the 1990s war. His government held an emergency session and proclaimed Wednesday a national day of mourning.
Residents said Bogdanovic first killed his son and his mother before leaving his house and then began shooting neighbours. They expressed deep shock, describing the suspect as a quiet, helpful man.
“He knocked on the doors and as they were opened he just fired a shot,” said villager Radovan Radosavljevic. “He was a good neighbour and anyone would open their doors to him. I don’t know what happened.”
“I never saw him angry, ever,” said Milovan Kostadinovic, another resident.
Still, neighbours said an entire five-member family was shot dead in one house, including the small boy who was the suspected killer’s cousin.
Kostadinovic said the suspect was confronted by police en route to his house. “If they didn’t stop him, he would have wiped us all out,” he said. “He shot himself when police stopped him.”
The suspected killer owned a gun but neighbours and his brother said he never hunted or shot weapons, even at weddings or celebrations as is traditional in the Balkans.
Serbia’s last big shooting spree occurred in 2007, when a 39-year-old man gunned down nine people and injured two others in the eastern village of Jabukovac.