Serbian police have killed a second suspect linked to a June 29 crossbow attack outside the Israeli embassy in Belgrade, the country’s interior minister announced on Sunday.
Senad Ramović was “liquidated” after he resisted arrest and opened fire at security forces in Hotkovo—located in Novi Pazar, historically a center of Serbia’s Bosniak Muslim minority—Interior Minister Ivica Dačić said in a statement to the state-run RTS broadcaster.
Ramović had been on the run since the prime suspect, Miloš Žujović, fired a crossbow at a police officer outside the Israeli mission in the capital’s Savski Venac government district in June. The officer was wounded in the neck but was able to return fire, killing the terrorist.
According to local media, Ramović played a “key role” in radicalizing Žujović, a convert to radical Islam from Mladenovac, near Belgrade.
Ramović had previously been sentenced to 13.5 years in prison on terror charges linked to a 2007 shootout with police, according to reports.
In the days following the attack near the Israeli embassy, Serbian authorities arrested two additional suspects, Dačić said at the time.
“Searches were conducted at several locations in Serbia, dozens of people were questioned,” the minister said. Prosecutors were probing whether they were linked with the “targeted terrorist attack,” he added.
“What is indisputable about all those people is that they belong to the Wahhabi extremist movement,” Dačić said, in reference to one of Sunni Islam’s most radical variants, which is also Saudi Arabia’s state religion as well as that of Qatar’s rulers.
Israeli legations around the world have been on high alert since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist invasion of the northwestern Negev.
Earlier in June, a man threw a fire bomb at the Israeli embassy in the Romanian capital Bucharest. There were no injuries or damage from the attack, and the suspected terrorist, of Syrian origin, was detained.
Israel’s embassy in the Netherlands was firebombed in mid-March, and in January, an apparent explosive device was found near the diplomatic mission of the Jewish state in the Swedish capital of Stockholm.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was behind the Swedish attack and other terrorist acts targeting Israeli embassies throughout Europe since Oct. 7, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency revealed on May 30.
