The teenage boy who executed eight of his classmates and a security guard in Belgrade had molotov cocktails in his bag and may have planned the heinous pre-meditated slaughter for months.
But despite the mountain of evidence against 13-year-old Kosta Kecmanović, a student at the Vladislav Ribnikar school in an upmarket pocket of Serbia's capital, Belgrade, he could avoid jail time because the age of criminal responsibility in the country is 14.
In Serbia, the law states that the boy is not subject to the same criminal proceedings as an adult.
However his dad, 48, has been detained on suspicion of committing "serious crimes against general security".
Even if the boy had been aged 14, he would've had to undergo extensive psychiatric evaluations in order to determine his sanity.
It's most likely that Kecmanović will be moved to a special location, or to a closed institution. This is mainly due to the potential for vigilante revenge attacks against himself and his family, reports avaz.ba.
Prosecutors, being unable to pin the charges on the killer, will likely be investigating how much responsibilty falls on the head of the child's carer, his father - who is said to have legally owned the gun used during the rampage.
According to Serbian law, the firearm owner has to store it in a locked metal cabinet so that it's inaccessible to other individuals.
To work out the father's role in the crime, investigators are looking in to how Kecmanović got his hands on the weapon and whether he'd been trained how to shoot it.
Police took blood samples from the boy to test for alcohol, drugs or other psychoactive substances.
Mounting evidence points to Kecmanović having planned the crime for a number of months.
He had drawn sketches of classrooms and made a list of kids he intended to target before opening fire in class, mowing down eight fellow students and a guard before calling police and being arrested.
Mass shootings are extremely rare in the Balkan region, although Serbia is awash in guns left over from the wars of the 1990s. No mass shootings have been reported at Serbian schools in recent years.
The shooter killed a school guard and then three students in a hallway of the Vladislav Ribnikar school in central Belgrade, according to senior police official Veselin Milic. He then entered a history classroom close to the school entrance and opened fire again, Milic said. Seven girls and one boy were killed, he said.
The victims included a girl with French citizenship, French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said in a statement. She provided no other details.
Ljiljana Radicevic told The Associated Press that her granddaughter was also killed in the shooting. Ana was near the school entrance when the assailant shot the school guard, "and then he shot at my Ana," Radicevic said.
"As soon as she did not answer, I knew it was over." Radicevic did not provide Ana's full name or age.
Six children and a teacher were also hospitalized. Two children remained in serious condition after hourslong surgeries, doctors said later Wednesday.
The assailant called police himself after the shooting was over. Authorities also received a call reporting the shooting two minutes earlier.
"The child who committed the crime said when he called the police that he shot some people in the school and that - he is a psychopath who needs to calm down," Milic told state television station RTS.
"He said that after committing (the crime) he was caught by fear and panic and funny breathing, and that it was the right thing to call the police and report the event."
The father of a student said the shooter entered his daughter's classroom, then fired at her teacher and classmates as they ducked under their desks. Most students escaped through a back door, according to a local official.
Milic said the shooter planned the attack for a month, sketching classrooms and writing out a list of children he planned to "liquidate."
Authorities said they did not know a motive for the shooting. It was unclear if he shot any of the students whom he named on his list.
The rarity of such attacks added to the shock many felt. Commentators on television and officials repeatedly said it was the kind of thing they expected to read about elsewhere, particularly in the United States. I
In the last mass shooting, a Balkan war veteran in 2013 killed 13 people, including family members and neighbors, in a central Serbian village.
