ZADAR, Croatia — A gunman killed at least six people and wounded six others on Monday morning at a home for older and infirm people in Croatia, the country’s police chief told reporters Monday afternoon. He said that the attacker had used a handgun and that a suspect was quickly arrested at a restaurant nearby.
The attack took place in Daruvar, a spa town of about 10,000 people in the country’s central region. It is about 62 miles southeast of Zagreb, the capital.
Five residents and one employee were killed, the police chief, Nikola Milina, said. Five died on the scene and one at the hospital. Milina said the handgun was not registered.
Andrej Plenkovic, Croatia’s prime minister, wrote on the social platform X that he was “appalled” by the killings. He expressed condolences to the families of the victims of the “terrible crime” as well as to those who were wounded in the attack.
President Zoran Milanovic of Croatia immediately called for stricter gun control after the attack, which he called a “savage, unprecedented crime” in a post on Facebook.
The police did not identify the suspect on Monday, but Milina said that he was a member of a military police unit and was known to the police.
The attack shook Croatia, where mass killings are rare, and the town of Daruvar, known for its hot springs and wine.
Family members were desperate for information on Monday as details of the killings began to emerge.
“I don’t remember that we’ve ever had this many people killed,” Plenkovic said at a news conference in Split on Monday afternoon.
He said some of the people who were killed were in their 90s.
He also said the Croatian police were trying to crack down on illegal firearms. Plenkovic said there were many unregistered guns in Croatia as a result of the country’s bloody war of independence in the 1990s.
Zeljko Crvtila, a criminalist and security analyst with Analytics, a consulting company, said there had been several cases in which multiple people had been killed by a gun, but that the scale of death on Monday was astonishing.
“Seeing five or more people killed, that shocks everyone,” he said.
© 2024 The New York Times Company