Five people, including a police officer, were killed and several injured in eastern Georgia when a former soldier opened fire from a balcony before killing himself, authorities in this Caucasus country reported on Friday.
The murder took place on Thursday evening in Sagarejo, a town of around 10,000 people about fifty kilometers east of the capital Tbilisi.
According to the Interior Ministry, the man opened fire with an automatic weapon from the balcony of an apartment building, killing four people and a police officer arriving at the scene in the courtyard of this apartment building.
Also, according to the same source, five people were injured, one seriously.
“A special forces commando arrived and called him to surrender. Of course he shot again,” Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri said.
When special forces broke down the apartment door, the suspect committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, he added.
The shooter’s motives were not immediately known.
According to initial information, the shooter, who was born in 1974, served in the Georgian armed forces between 2006 and 2021 and, according to Gomelauri, was mainly deployed in Afghanistan.
This killing shocked Georgia: while incidents involving firearms are common, mass killings are rare.
In October, a man opened fire in a restaurant in Batumi (west), killing one person.
The small Caucasus country, still recovering from a blitzkrieg lost to Russia in 2008, has been rocked for several months by a political crisis surrounding the imprisonment of former President Mikhail Saakashvili.