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Zadar school shooting

school shooting that occured on October 9, 1972, at Zadar High School

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 15, 2025
Entity authorityQ131522439 ↗
Source-derived summary

On 9 October 1972, a 19-year-old student shot two teachers at a gymnasium in Zadar (current-day Vladimir Nazor Gymnasium), in SR Croatia, at the time in Yugoslavia. One teacher died at the scene, while the other died at a hospital.

Events

On the morning of 9 October 1972 Milorad Vulinović, a 19-year-old student of Serbian descent, arrived at Zadar Gymnasium with intent to kill his history teacher, Vica Vlatković (aged 43). With his father's Beretta M70, the student shot Vlatković and the school's sociology teacher Gojko Matulina (aged 33), who came to deescalate and eventually succumbed to his gunshot wounds in a hospital. Not long after the murder, a teacher from the school met Vulinović on the street and saw him take to the nearby pâtisserie named Jadran to eat a cremeschnitte, awaiting arrest.

During a police interrogation, Vulinović stated that he hated Vlatković for his grading and teaching. During the trial, in his defence he also claimed that the victim was a Croatian nationalist. The Croatian Spring happened a year earlier. Court psychiatrists found that Vulinović had a "psychopathic personality" with "a tendency towards schizoid psychopathy". He was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Goli otok, which was the most severe sentence intended for young adults in socialist Yugoslavia.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Zadar school shooting” as school shooting that occured on October 9, 1972, at Zadar High School. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA strong contextual entry point for chronology, institutions and public events when official records are distinguished from later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1972—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Zadar, school and shooting can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as school shooting that occured on October 9, 1972, at Zadar High School. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q131522439. Authority coordinates are 44.111, 15.229. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Zadar school shooting”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Zadar school shooting primary sources, Zadar school shooting archive and Zadar research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Zadar school shooting”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Zadar school shooting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.