Gunman Kills Bosnian Policeman
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - A gunman attacked a police station in eastern Bosnia on Monday, killing one police officer and wounding two before he was shot dead, a police spokeswoman said.
The attack occurred at around 7 pm (1700 GMT) in Zvornik, a town in Bosnia's Serb-dominated autonomous region, the Serb Republic, which together with the Bosniak-Croat Federation makes up the Bosnia that emerged from the 1992-95 war.
"This is the worst terrorism attack that could happen in the Serb Republic," regional Interior Minister Dragan Lukac told local television, adding that security levels had been raised after the attack.
Lukac identified the attacker as 24-year-old Nerdin Ibric from a village near Zvornik. He said the attack was carried out while police officers were changing shifts, and that he obviously knew that most officers would be present at that time, Reuters reported.
He said that Ibric drove his car to the police station and opened fire with a shot gun, killing a policemen before he stormed into the station and wounded two other officers. He was then killed in an exchange of fire.
Ibric also had a pistol and pockets filled with ammunition, while another shot gun was found in his car.
Lukac told the Serb Republic television that a man from Ibric's village said he had acted in a strange way in recent days and prayed in a local mosque in an unusual way.
Doctors said the police officers' wounds were not life-threatening.
This was the first attack of its kind in the Serb Republic, though similar ones have occurred in the Federation, including a 2010 bomb attack on a police station in central Bosnia and an attack on the US embassy in the capital Sarajevo a year later.
