Three people were killed at a shooting range near Danilovgrad, and the man suspected of shooting them was found dead in a forest above Herceg Novi. Montenegro declared two days of mourning. Between those two sentences lies an entire night in which a country shut itself in.

The victims are Petar Globarević (24) from Podgorica, Momir Radonjić (67) from Danilovgrad and Nemanja Kapora (20) from Podgorica. All three worked at the range. Two of them were in their twenties. The oldest was at an age when a man is already thinking about retirement, not about not coming home from work.

The suspect is a 30-year-old Russian citizen. According to police, after the shooting at around 16:45 he stole a vehicle from the father of one of the victims and headed towards Podgorica. The car was found abandoned in a meadow, and he is then believed to have continued by taxi to Herceg Novi. There, at around 3:35 in the morning, he was surrounded in a forest above the Topla neighbourhood. Police said he first fired at the officers and then killed himself.

A country with closed doors

In the hours in between, Montenegro lived through a scenario most Balkan countries know only from films. Towns blocked, border crossings blocked, airports blocked. Police told citizens not to leave their homes because the fugitive was armed and dangerous. An army helicopter, special units and border police were used in the manhunt.

That is a serious operation and it is over. But the question that remains is not about the manhunt - it is about what came before it: how one man walked into a shooting range and walked out of it leaving three people dead. Who checks the people who come to a place like that, who keeps the records, who answers if the records do not exist.

The police, together with the Higher State Prosecutor's Office in Podgorica, said they are investigating all the circumstances, including the motive. The motive is what everyone will wait for. But the procedure is worth more, because one man's motive does not repeat itself, while a gap in the system does.

Shooting ranges in the Balkans operate with permits, rulebooks and oversight that exist on paper almost everywhere. How much of that is alive in practice is not a Montenegrin question. It is a question every neighbour in the region can ask about their own back yard, without waiting for three dead to remember it.

For now Montenegro has two days of mourning, three funerals and one closed case with no defendant. The crisis in Herceg Novi is over, as the interior minister announced. What started at the shooting range near Danilovgrad is not.