Teacher wounded by former student in Bosnia school shooting

The incident comes after two mass shootings in neighboring Serbia showed the normalization of violence in the Balkans.

A teacher was injured after being shot by a former student at a school in the Bosnian town of Lukavac.

“The child, who is not yet 14 years old, is under police supervision in the premises of the Lukavac police, while firearms and other discarded items are kept until the investigation begins,” the Tuzla canton’s interior ministry said on Wednesday.

According to Bosnian Education Minister Ahmed Omerovic, the attacker was a former student of the school and had been transferred to another school as a “disciplinary measure”.

The injured teacher, who has been identified as Ismet Osmanovic, was teaching English at the school and was intubated and operated on, according to a statement from Tuzla University Clinical Center.

“The operation is still going on. Doctors told me he was stable,” Osmanovic’s father told local media.

Mass shootings in Serbia

Wednesday’s school shooting comes after two separate mass shootings in two days last month rocked neighboring Serbia, killing at least 17 people, including eight children.

In an interview with Al Jazeera following last month’s school shooting in Serbia, psychologist Marina Nadejin Simic said the school shooting was “a red line” for the country.

“Unfortunately, in our society, violence is all around us and tolerated. In a way, it’s a normalization of violence… Those kids have gotten used to living in such an environment and some of them feel pretty bad,” she said.

Compounding the problem is that “many kids spend a lot more time online than they do in the real world,” leading to undeveloped emotional and social skills, Nadejin Simic said.

Wednesday’s violence also echoed in Bosnia, where about 31 out of every 100 citizens in the Balkan country own a gun, according to a report by the Small Arms Survey.

Most of these guns and other weapons were smuggled into the country because of an arms embargo during the war in the 1990s.

Since then, authorities have tried to address the issue in an effort to tackle gun violence.

Last month, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also stressed the importance of arms control in the Western Balkans, according to a report by Euronews Albania.

Speaking to EU officials, he said: “We all know that this activity poses a great threat to our peace and stability. It is a multiple threat and also increases the risk of terrorist attacks.”

The 27-member bloc has so far invested 38 million euros ($41 million) in arms control in the Western Balkans.