By JOVANA GEC
BELGRADE, Serbia — Thousands of people are expected to rally in Serbia’s capital on Friday for a third time in a month in protests following two mass shootings, even as government officials in the Balkan country rejected opposition criticism of the way they handled the crisis.
The protesters are demanding the resignations of two senior ministers and the revocation of broadcasting licenses for two TV networks which, they say, promote violence and glorify crime figures.
Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and other government officials attended a parliamentary session on Friday focusing on the May 3 and May 4 shootings and the opposition demands to replace the interior minister and the intelligence chief following the carnage that left 18 people dead, many of them children.
The two shootings stunned the nation, especially because the first one happened in an elementary school in central Belgrade when a 13-year-old boy took his father’s gun and opened fire on his fellow students. Eight students and a school guard were killed and seven more people wounded. One more girl later died in hospital from head wounds.
A day later, a 20-year-old used an automatic weapon to randomly target people he ran into in two villages south of Belgrade, killing eight people and wounding 14.
Brnabic rejected allegations that the populist authorities were in any way responsible for the shootings. Instead, she accused the opposition of fueling violence in society and threatening President Aleksandar Vucic. Brnabic blasted the opposition-led protests as “purely political”, saying they were intended to topple Vucic and the government by force.
“You are the core of the spiral of violence in this society,” Brnabic told opposition lawmakers. “You are spewing hatred.”
She also said that “everything that has happened” in Serbia after the mass shootings was “directly the work of foreign intelligence services,” adding that her government could be changed…
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