Three instructors killed at a shooting range in Montenegro. According to police, the suspect rented a gun there; the new law had been in force for twelve days

On Monday afternoon, three employees were killed at a shooting range near Danilovgrad in central Montenegro: twenty-year-old Nemanja Kapor, Petar Globarević, who was four years older, and sixty-seven-year-old Momir Radonjić. Montenegrin police suspect thirty-year-old Russian citizen Mihail Šabunjin of the killings, and according to their initial information he rented a gun at that same shooting range that day. The government declared September 1 and September 2 days of mourning and postponed the start of the school year in Danilovgrad until Thursday. Vijesti ↗ N1 ↗

Vijesti describe the attack step by step, owner is said to have survived because he was asleep

According to Police Administration director Lazar Šćepanović, the shooting took place around 4:45 p.m. The suspect is said to have first gone to the shooting range to fire shots, then entered the building and killed three people. "This is a dangerous person who had taken with him a certain number of rounds of ammunition and a firearm. This is a potential danger; this is an active threat," Šćepanović told reporters. Vijesti ↗

Vijesti published a more detailed reconstruction based on its own sources. The attacker is said to have first fired several shots at instructor Globarević at the range and then shot him in the head. He then allegedly returned to the part of the facility used for gun rentals and killed Radonjić and finally the youngest victim, Kapor. All three were reportedly shot multiple times. According to the newspaper, the owner of the shooting range, who was sleeping in one of the rooms, survived the attack. A source involved in the investigation told the paper that the suspect was firing from two guns at once, with both hands, but did not specify whether that happened during the crime or whether the cameras captured it during training. Vijesti ↗

According to Vijesti, he left the shooting range with several stolen guns and ammunition. Police said he fled in a black Seat Cordoba belonging to the father of one of the victims. The car was found in a meadow near the village of Rogami in the Podgorica area, outside Danilovgrad. Vijesti ↗

Eleven hours of searching and a dispute over whether children should go to school

Police urged residents to stay at home and set up roadblocks in several cities. It later announced that the suspect had moved from Podgorica to Herceg Novi by taxi and that a special unit backed by a helicopter from the Army of Montenegro had also been deployed in the area. Vijesti ↗

Shortly before 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, he was surrounded in the forest above the Herceg Novi neighborhood of Topla by members of the police special and elite units together with border police. "When he was surrounded and found himself in a hopeless situation, he opened fire in the direction of the police officers and then killed himself using a firearm," the Police Administration said. Nearly eleven hours had passed since the first shots at the range. Vijesti ↗

That length was exactly what triggered a dispute overnight, one that was not about the police but about schools. The government postponed the start of the school year only in Danilovgrad, although the search and roadblocks were also taking place in Podgorica and other cities. The informal civic movement STEGA called this a contradictory signal. "If citizens are ordered to stay at home because of an armed and dangerous person, then parents cannot be expected to send children out into the streets and to school without a clear safety assessment," the movement said. It called on the Ministry of Education and the police to publish which areas were at risk and to postpone classes wherever the search was under way. "Children must not be a test of how the state assesses safety," it added. Vijesti ↗

President Jakov Milatović said the news had "deeply shaken and chilled" him, Parliament Speaker Andrija Mandić called for caution, and Prime Minister Milojko Spajić announced days of mourning. Vijesti ↗ Danas ↗

A law that had been in force for twelve days

Montenegro was rewriting its firearms legislation under pressure from two massacres. On August 12, 2022, Vuk Borilović shot dead ten people, including two children, in Cetinje. On January 1, 2025, Aco Martinović killed twelve people there, again including two children, seriously wounded four others and then took his own life. It was the worst massacre in the country's history. The same Lazar Šćepanović, who is now leading the search in Herceg Novi, said at the time that Martinović was known to the police: in 2022, officers found unlicensed weapons with him and he was sentenced to three months in prison, but the sentence was never served because he appealed. Balkan Insight ↗

The government reacted quickly. Spajić declared a two-month amnesty for holders of illegal weapons and promised harsher penalties; after three weeks, people had handed in 1,535 items. The police union estimated that in a country of roughly 600,000 people, as many as 100,000 illegal weapons were in circulation. RFE/RL ↗

The new Law on Weapons and Ammunition entered into force on August 19, 2026, twelve days before the shooting in Danilovgrad. It raised the minimum age for obtaining a firearms permit from eighteen to twenty-one, shortened permits from ten years to five, and transposes the European directive on the control of the acquisition and possession of weapons. According to Večernje novosti, the parliamentary majority passed it on Friday minutes before midnight and without debate, which angered the opposition, hunters and sport shooters. The law affects roughly 70,000 legal gun owners. Večernje novosti ↗

What matters is what this means for the Danilovgrad case. The law explicitly regulates the "provision of sport and recreational shooting services," and under it only citizens and persons with permanent residence can obtain a firearms permit. Renting a gun at a shooting range, however, is a different route to a loaded weapon than ownership itself. And the secondary regulations meant to implement the new law, according to its own wording, are to be adopted within a year of its entry into force, that is, by August 2027. Sjever Crne Gore ↗

So far, nothing indicates that the shooting range violated any rule. The question Montenegro will likely ask after this case is different: whether a regime that spent three years focusing on who may own a gun also adequately covers situations in which a person is handed one for an hour and without a personal permit.

The Russian community whose rules will change in November

The suspect's Russian citizenship is a politically sensitive detail in Montenegro, not an explanation of motive. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, more than 5,800 Russian-owned companies have been established there, and between February 2022 and July 2023 alone, Russian citizens received 29,294 temporary and permanent residence permits, compared with 6,343 in 2021. According to data cited in 2025 and 2026, about 21,000 Russians with valid residence permits were living in the country. Balkan Insight ↗

From November 1, 2026, Russian citizens will need a visa to enter and stay in Montenegro. The government decided this by decree on July 23, more than a month before the shooting, and it also applies to citizens of Belarus, Turkey, China and Saudi Arabia. The reason has nothing to do with crime; it is about aligning visa policy with the European Union and meeting one of the final benchmarks for closing the chapter on justice, freedom and security in accession talks. Slobodna Evropa ↗

Limits of this view

The motive remains unknown. Police have not disclosed it, and because the suspect died, no court will ever rule on his guilt. Everything we know about how the crime unfolded comes from police statements and from Vijesti sources that cannot be independently verified. The reconstruction of the sequence of murders and the claim that two guns were used are, for now, based on a single source.

It is equally important to separate two things that ended up side by side in this story by coincidence. The introduction of visas for Russian citizens was planned before the shooting. And although the attack happened shortly after the new firearms law entered into force, nothing so far shows that a stricter law could have stopped it.

Vijesti is a private newspaper that has long been among the critical voices toward the governing majority, while Večernje novosti is a Serbian pro-government newspaper, and their assessment of the firearms law should be read with that in mind.

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