Police were intially wrongly informed that the restaurant was in a nearby village where they first rushed, he said.
Most of the victims, all killed within about 30 minutes, were the gunman’s “acquaintances, friends, godfathers and closest relatives”, including his sister, Scepanovic said.
The victims were seven men, three women and two children, he said.
Police said the two murdered children were aged 8 and 13. They had earlier given the younger child’s age as 10.
Four people were seriously injured and received hospital treatment in the capital, Podgorica.
On Thursday, all four were at an intensive care unit and their lives were in danger, a hospital statement said.
‘Completely senseless’
“To kill children ... is completely senseless. That is not a crime, it is something more than that,” pensioner Danilo Zecevic said in Cetinje, where the streets were deserted on Thursday.
In the evening, citizens started to gather in silence in the central part of Cetinje to light candles for the victims.
A similar gathering was due at Podgorica’s main square on Thursday.
Police said earlier that the suspect had been drinking all day long before an altercation between him and a restaurant guest.
He left to take a weapon before returning to kill four people at the restaurant and then moving on to the other locations, Scepanovic said.
Police had ruled out any “showdown between organised criminal groups”, adding that the gun used was owned illegally.
Weapons control
Prime Minister Milojko Spajic labelled the shootings, which happened after a restaurant fight went wrong, a “terrible tragedy”.
He suggested there would be a review of the country’s gun ownership laws, including considering a complete ban on the possession of weapons.
The country’s National Security Council is to meet on Friday to review “key challenges in the detection and seizure of illegal weapons” and the recruitment of more police officers, a government statement said.
Scepanovic said on Thursday the gunman had a history of possessing illegal weapons that were seized from him in 2022. He was sentenced to three months in jail, but appealed the verdict.
According to the Small Arms Survey (SAS), a Swiss research programme, there are about 245,000 firearms in circulation in Montenegro.
But mass shootings are rare in the Balkan nation of just over 620,000 people.
In 2022, a man murdered 10 Cetinje residents, including two children, in broad daylight before being killed, in one of the deadliest such incidents to rock the country.
Cetinje, with a population of about 13,000 people, is the site of the former royal capital and sits in a mountainous valley that has largely stagnated economically.
The area and its surroundings are strongholds of organised criminal groups, and clashes erupt sporadically between rival mafia clans.
Organised crime and corruption remain two major issues plaguing Montenegro that authorities have pledged to tackle in its bid to join the European Union.
- Agence France-Presse
