A shooting Wednesday outside the Serbian parliament in Belgrade that left one person injured was a “terrorist attack,” President Aleksandar Vučić said.
“He carried out — this is my political assessment, and as a lawyer — an awful terrorist attack on other people and on others’ property; he caused general danger. The final legal qualification of the act will be given by the competent prosecutor’s office,” Vučić said at a press conference shortly after the shooting.
In a video shared on social platform X, gunfire is heard and black smoke rises from a fire at a tent camp outside the parliament. The man who was injured is in serious condition and will undergo surgery, according to local media.
The tent settlement was erected by supporters of Vučić in front of the parliament during the anti-government, student-led protests that have turned into the largest demonstrations across the country since Slobodan Milošević’s ouster in 2000.
“It was a question of time before this would happen … There were countless calls for this,” said Vučić, who has repeatedly accused the protesters of violence.
Vučić said that the suspected perpetrator, a pensioner from Belgrade, was arrested.
The students, who plan another big protest on Oct. 31, said in a post on X that their strategy “has never been a path of violence.”
The protests began last November after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 16 people, including two young children, and leaving several others gravely injured.
The government denies any blame despite accusations linking the tragedy to a state-run renovation project plagued by shoddy construction and oversight failures.
The post Serbia’s Vučić denounces ‘terrorist attack’ after shooting outside parliament appeared first on Politico.
