Parents of Serbia's teenage school shooter given jail terms in retrial
The parents of a boy who shot dead nine children and a security guard at a Serbian elementary school have been given jail terms in a retrial in Belgrade.
The boy was 13 when he shot dead seven girls, a boy and a school guard at Vladislav Ribnikar school in Belgrade in 2023. Another girl died later in hospital.
The shooter was under the age of criminal responsibility and was placed in a psychiatric institution, but his parents Vladimir and Miljana Kecmanović were accused of neglect and abuse of a minor, while his father was also accused of a serious offence against public safety.
Kecmanović was sentenced to 14 years and six months in prison on Thursday. His wife received two years and 11 months.
Both defence and prosecution have lodged appeals against the jail terms.
Zora Dobričanin, a lawyer representing families of the victims, spoke of the trial as a "long fight" that would continue in the court of appeal.
Mass gun attacks were extremely rare in Serbia and school shootings unheard of, when the Belgrade attack took place on 3 May 2023. The boy had taken two handguns from his father's safe, put them in his backpack and gone to school, opening fire in the hall and then a classroom.
As well as the 10 people killed, another five children and a history teacher were wounded.
Two days later a gunman killed nine people in a drive-by attack near Belgrade.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest and the Serbian government reacted with a gun amnesty and tougher laws.
The boy's parents first went on trial in 2024, when the court heard evidence from their son behind closed doors.
Although the father was given a long jail term for training his son to handle guns and failing to store them safely, the boy's mother was cleared of illegal possession of firearms and convicted of neglect. An instructor from a shooting range where the boy practised was also found guilty of giving false evidence.
However, the court of appeal in Belgrade ordered a retrial for the boy's parents in November 2025, ruling that the reasons behind the verdicts were unclear and contradictory. The father was kept in custody, while the mother was allowed to stay out of jail until this year's trial.
The retrial began last January and the chief prosecutor argued that convictions for the parents would provide part of the answer to how Serbian society responded to one of the most tragic events in the country's peacetime history.
Detailing what had happened on 3 May 2023, the judge revealed that the boy had fired 66 bullets over a period of two minutes and one second, and many of them had hit his victims, Serbian reports said.
Defence counsel for the couple told the court that its decision to find both parents guilty of neglect was no different from the initial verdict that had been overturned.
They argued that the charges had not been proven and no expert opinion had been provided as evidence that the boy had been neglected.
<small>Source: BBC News</small>
