At Least 6 Killed at Nursing Home in 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. Mr. Milina said the handgun was not registered.
Andrej Plenkovic, Croatia’s prime minister, wrote on 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 Mr. Milina said that he was a member of a military police unit and was known to the police.
The local authorities had interacted with the man three times, Mr. Milina said, most recently a month ago. He disturbed the public order and peace in 2012, the chief said, and was involved in domestic violence in 2004. Mr. Milina added that there had been violence in the family, between the suspect and his father.
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.
Pero Ivandekic, whose wife runs the facility, the Vianey Home for the Elderly and Infirm, said he was waiting for news about his son-in-law Sven Sikiric, who he said was at the nursing home during the shooting and was taken to a hospital.
Mr. Ivandekic said in a phone interview that he rushed to the home after the owner of a store across the street called him and said, “Don’t ask any questions. Just come here. Quick.”
When he arrived, Mr. Ivandekic said, he found the home surrounded by over 20 police vehicles. He said that Mr. Sikiric was wounded, and he was waiting to hear from his daughter for updates.
“I have no idea what’s going on or who is in what condition,” he said.
Croatia’s homicide rate has been falling since 2000, according to the World Health Organization; in 2019, there were about 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people. From 2019 to 2021, it had one of the lower homicide rates by firearm in Europe, according to data from the United Nations.
“I don’t remember that we’ve ever had this many people killed,” Mr. 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 that the Croatian police were trying to crack down on illegal firearms. Mr. Plenkovic said that there were many unregistered guns in Croatia as a result of the country’s bloody war of independence in the 1990s.
“The fact that that sort of war happened brought us to many people having weapons in their homes,” Mr. Plenkovic said, including the gunman.
Would-be firearm buyers in Croatia have to undergo mental-health screening and a security background check, said Zeljko Crvtila, a criminalist and security analyst with Analytics, a consulting company. They also have to make an explicit case for needing a gun and pass a course on how to handle and store firearms.
Mr. Crvtila 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.
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