Zagreb Protest After Knife Attack at School

A protest began this morning outside Zagreb’s Electrical Engineering School in Konavoska Street, with parents demanding greater safety in classrooms a week after a knife attack that injured a student and a cleaner. The demands the organizers put forward, checking children at the school entrance and lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 12, raise a question that isn’t only Croatian: the same age threshold applies in Serbia’s Criminal Code, so the debate held Monday, September 14, outside the Zagreb school is measurable for schools in Serbia too.

The attack happened on Friday, September 11, when a minor student used a sharp object to injure a classmate and a 59 year old cleaner, and attempted to injure another employee. Both of the injured were operated on as an emergency. Srpske Novine previously reported on the attack itself, in a piece about the masked student who attacked a classmate and the cleaner with a knife. According to the latest information carried by RTRS, the injured student is stable and conscious but remains in intensive care at Zagreb’s KBC clinical hospital center. After a psychiatric examination, the minor attacker was handed over to the detention service. The Electrical Engineering School shares its building with the Mechanical Engineering School, and classes are proceeding normally, according to RTRS, while crisis teams work with students, teachers and non teaching staff this week.

Why are parents demanding the age be lowered to 12?

The protest was organized by the association Parents for Children (Roditelji za djecu), led by Helena Ancic. The organizers put forward three demands to the authorities:

• that school staff be authorized to check students and their belongings at the entrance
• that the age of criminal responsibility be lowered from 14 to 12
• that stricter penalties be introduced for parents whose children commit violence

The reasoning behind the second demand is a practical one. Under Croatia’s current Law on Courts for Youth, an offender older than 14 but younger than 16 cannot be sent to a juvenile prison, and the harshest measure available is placement in an educational institution, where the law allows a stay of between six months and three years.

Several speakers with a personal connection to the issue addressed the gathering. Marko Sikirica, a safety engineer and father of a girl who was in the same class as the boy killed in an earlier attack at Zagreb’s Precko school, recalled that change had been promised after that tragedy. “I came here for young people, because they deserve a better future. There isn’t much to say, we have to act. Something did change a little after Precko,” Sikirica told the crowd, according to Index.hr.

Professor Mario Bozuric, who held the injured student after the attack and kept him from bleeding out, sent a sharp message to the authorities:

“This is a place from which we should be shouting. But not at this school, from this school toward Svetice.”

He added that schools currently erase disciplinary measures imposed on students automatically after six months, which he says makes it impossible to track the behavior of children who have already acted violently once before.

Former water polo national team player Vedran Jerkovic, father of a girl with a disability who attends the same school, spoke about the indifference shown toward children with developmental difficulties and concluded: “We’ve lost all sense of the word empathy.” Teaching assistant Goranka Markovic warned against letting the situation turn into what she described as the American scenario: “We must not allow ourselves to become America,” she said, calling on the authorities to finally listen to parents and experts.

The injured student’s mother told Croatian media she learned of the attack from her son himself, not from the school or the police. “It was indescribable, horrific,” she said, according to Kurir. She says she had reported violence before and that the attackers belong to “a group from the old elementary school”: “They’re boys, it’s a group from the old elementary school,” she said. Croatian police, however, say the opposite. A report her son filed on February 5, 2026, at an educational institution in the Novi Zagreb area is not connected, according to the official statement, to Friday’s attacker, who police say did not even take part in that earlier conflict. Sikirica’s reference to Precko, meanwhile, concerns an entirely separate, earlier tragedy at another Zagreb school, not the February incident.

If the attacker is convicted, Croatia’s Law on Courts for Youth requires a court to reconsider every six months whether there are grounds for him to remain in the educational institution, be released, or have the measure replaced with another one. Whether even one of the three demands raised at the protest in Konavoska Street will make it into law is something Croatia’s Ministry of Science and Education has not yet said.