Utah gunman was Srebrenica siege survivor

It has emerged that the 18-year-old gunman who shot five people dead in a Salt Lake City shopping mall was a survivor of the siege of Srebrenica. During the Bosnian war, Sulejman Talovic’s family sought refuge in the UN-protected enclave. They spent two years in the town before it was overrun by Bosnian Serbs in 1995 who went on to kill some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

Sulejman and his mother were evacuated by the UN and later reunited with his father, according to his cousin, Redzo Talovic. He remembers him being a “little bit playful as a child, but no-one could have imagined he would ever do such a thing,” he says.

The teenager, dressed in a trench coat and carrying a shotgun, a .38 calibre pistol and what police said was a “backpack full of ammunition,” opened fire at random. He was stopped by an off-duty officer before being killed by police who arrived in force.

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