Three staff members of a school in Bosnia & Herzegovina were killed on August 21 in a shooting started by a cleaner who was working there. The assailant was injured and in critical condition, the police authorities in the town of Sanski Most announced.

The shooting at school in the town of Sanski Most in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska took place in the morning during a summer break.

"At 10.06 am today, there was a triple homicide in the high school. After that, the attacker attempted to commit suicide, but failed, and was hospitalised at the University Centre of Republika Srpska," Amel Kozlica, head of the police directorate, said at a televised press conference.

The perpetrator used an automatic rifle and murdered the school’s director, an English language teacher and a secretary.

"Since the morning we are trying to understand the context of what has happenned in our town. It is an isolated case but it is not clear to us why the person killed three of his colleagues," Sanski Most's mayor Faris Hasanbegovic said during a joint press conference with the police in the afternoon.

According to unofficial information from N1, the cleaner had had disagreements with the three dead people for some time, claiming they were discriminating against him.

The school launched disciplinary proceedings against the shooter and, according to witnesses, he was specifically looking for the members of the disciplinary commission, shooting at them.

N1 also reported that allegedly he has mental health problems.

The shooting at the school in Bosnia came more than a year after a mass shooting in a school in Belgrade carried out by a 13-year-old boy shocked the Serbian nation.

Followed a day later by another mass shooting, the deadly incidents sparked a wave of protests, with demonstrators urging the government to tackle what they said was a culture of violence within Serbia. 

While mass shootings are still relatively rare in the Western Balkans, there have been several deadly attacks in the last year. Among the most shocking was the live-streamed murder of three people in Bosnia in August 2023. 

Last month, six people were killed by a gunman in a nursing home in the Croatian spa town of Daruvar, east of Zagreb, on July 22. The suspect was a retired military police officer who killed his mother along with other residents and staff.

Decades after the wars of the 1990s, the Western Balkans region remains ‘awash’ with weapons, fueling violence domestically and abroad, said a comment from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime earlier this year.