According to the first elements communicated by the government and the police, it was a fight that went wrong and the suspect also killed members of his own family, according to the minister who spoke of a “private” event.
This 45-year-old man was still on the run in the evening, sought by the police and the army who invited the inhabitants of Cetinje to stay at home.
In a speech in the evening, Prime Minister Milojko Spajic announced a three-day national mourning, on January 2, 3 and 4, and specified that four people had been seriously injured.
“The doctors are fighting to save them,” the Prime Minister said, adding that “all police teams, special units and all possible law enforcement agencies (were) in Cetinje.”
“We are looking for the culprit and we are on the right path,” he stressed.
According to him, it was “only a fight in a restaurant, during which weapons were drawn, and which degenerated”. Mr. Spajic also announced new restrictions to come on gun ownership.
“This tragedy raises the question of who can have weapons in Montenegro,” he added.
Crimes
On site, near the traditional restaurant in which the tragedy took place, the police prevented anyone from approaching in the evening. Dozens of men, police vehicles and at least one ambulance were visible behind the barriers, noted an AFP journalist.
Assuring in its press release that this shooting was “not the result of a confrontation between groups belonging to organized crime”, the Montenegrin police urged residents to stay at home while the suspect was on the run.
Although the police seem to favor the hypothesis of a non-mafia crime, organized crime and corruption have long affected Montenegro, and the town of Cetinje has been particularly affected in recent months.
In June, two people died and three were injured there in an explosion – members of a criminal group, according to police. Among the injured were two other suspected gang members, as well as a female bystander.
After this explosion, the government promised to attack organized crime. But at the end of September, another member of a mafia clan was killed, again in Cetinje, the former royal capital nestled in the hollow of a valley. He was shot and killed by sniper fire while sitting in his backyard.
These settling of scores are all linked, investigators suspect, to the conflict which has opposed two criminal groups for years, the “skaljari” and the “kavaci”.
The small Balkan country – 630,000 inhabitants – has often promised to tackle these crimes in the hope of joining the European Union.
“Our thoughts this evening are with the families who lost loved ones and with the residents of Cetinje. All of Montenegro feels and shares your pain. We pray for the recovery of all the injured,” the country’s president, Jakov Milatovic, wrote on X .
