At the least 15 folks had been killed throughout a taking pictures rampage within the Czech Republic on Thursday, together with 14 folks at Charles College in Prague and the suspect’s father, the authorities stated. Twenty-four different folks had been wounded on the college.
The gunman, a 24-year-old pupil in world historical past at Charles College, additionally killed himself after the taking pictures spree in central Prague. He first killed his father of their household residence within the city of Kladno, outdoors of Prague, Radek Jiroudek, a police officer with Interpol Prague, stated in an interview.
The police partly recognized the assailant as David Ok. European police officers usually give solely a primary title and final preliminary for privateness causes. Talking at a information convention in Prague, the chief of the nationwide police pressure, Martin Vondrasek, stated the assailant “got inspired by a similar terrible event abroad.” He didn’t specify the place.
However the authorities stated they didn’t imagine that the gunman’s actions had been linked to worldwide terrorism.
The authorities had been investigating whether or not violent, expletive-laden Russian-language messages posted on Telegram beneath the title David Kozak had been linked to the gunman, the police chief added. One message stated that two mass shootings in Russia had offered inspiration — one this month at a faculty in Bryansk close to the border with Ukraine, and the second in 2021 in Kazan, capital of the Russian area of Tatarstan.
“I was very inspired by Alina … very much,” stated a message posted on Dec. 10, three days after a 14-year-old lady, Alina Afanaskina, opened hearth on her classmates, killing two of them, with a pump shotgun in Bryansk. However, the message continued: “She certainly did not kill enough. I will try to fix that.”
One other publish the identical day stated: “I always wanted to kill. I thought I would be a maniac in the future.”
A message on Telegram posted a day earlier stated, “This will be my diary as I go toward school shooting.” That message was edited on Thursday, however it’s not clear how.
The channel instantly went “private” late Thursday after the taking pictures. By that time, David Ok. was already useless.
If the gunman and the Telegram author had been, in reality, the identical particular person, it was not instantly clear how a native-born Czech who grew up in a small village in Central Bohemia would have acquired a mastery of the Russian language, together with faddish slang utilized by younger Russians on-line and a wealthy vocabulary of swear phrases.
The governor of the Prague area, Bohuslav Svoboda, stated the gunman had fallen from the roof of the college’s school of arts constructing after opening hearth on Jan Palach Sq., an space of manicured lawns adjoining to the Vltava River that cuts by way of the Czech capital.
The police stated the humanities constructing, in Prague’s Outdated City, had been evacuated. The sq. subsequent to it was sealed off. Movies posted on social media confirmed folks working away.
Mass shootings are uncommon within the Central European nation, and alarm over the taking pictures prompted the prime minister, Petr Fiala, to chop quick a visit to the town of Olomouc within the east of the Czech Republic and rush again to Prague.
President Petr Pavel of the Czech Republic stated in a post on X that he was “shocked by the events at the faculty of arts of Charles University.” The college, The Related Press reported, deliberate to tighten safety instantly.
Although usually very peaceable, the Czech capital was on edge even earlier than the killings, after a father and his child daughter had been discovered useless from gunshot wounds final week in Klanovice forest, a rich space east of Prague.
“I express my deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the Czech people as a whole,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Fee, stated in a post on X on Thursday. “We stand and mourn with you.”
The inside minister, Vit Rakusan, said on social media that the taking pictures was “unprecedented” within the historical past of the Czech Republic. “I want to express my sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of all the victims of the shooting,” he stated.
The sq. the place the taking pictures occurred is known as after Jan Palach, a 20-year-old pupil who set himself on hearth in 1969 to protest the invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia by troops from the Soviet Union and its allies within the Warsaw Pact. He died three days later, turning into a martyr to the anti-communist trigger.
On the time of his demise, he was finding out historical past at Charles College, which was based in 1348 and is among the world’s oldest universities.
Barbora Petrova and Amanda E. Newman contributed reporting.
