13 people killed in shooting spree

VELIKA IVANCA (AP):

He went from house to house in the village at dawn, cold-bloodedly gunning down his mother, his son, a two-year-old cousin and 10 other neighbours. Terrified residents said if a police patrol car hadn't shown up, they all would have been dead.

Police said they knew of no motive yet in the carnage yesterday that left six men, six women and a child dead in Velika Ivanca, a Serbian village 50 kilometres (30 miles) southeast of Belgrade.

After the rampage, police said suspect Ljubisa Bogdanovic, a 60-year-old who saw action in one of the bloodiest sieges of the Balkan wars, turned his gun on himself and his wife as authorities closed in. Both were in grave condition at a hospital in the Serbian capital.

In the small lush village surrounded by fruit trees, the suspect's older brother Radmilo broke down in tears, unable to explain why the massacre had happened.

"Why did he do it? … I still can't believe it," he said, sobbing, covering his face with his hands. "He was a model of honesty."

"As a child, he was a frightened little boy. I used to defend him from other children. He couldn't even slaughter a chicken," he said.

But he said his brother had changed after serving in the army during a brutal Serb-led offensive against the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in 1992, the worst bloodshed during Croatia's 1991-95 war for independence.

"The war had burdened him," Radmilo, 62, told The Associated Press in an interview. "He used to tell me: God forbid you live through what I went through ... . Something must have clicked in his head for him to do this."

Twelve people in the village were killed immediately between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. and one person died later in a Belgrade hospital, Serbian police chief Milorad Veljovic said.