He climbed to the roof of the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague and began shooting wildly, killing 15 people and wounding 24. Then he committed suicide or was perhaps eliminated by the rushing officers.
David Kozak, 24 years old, Czech, student at the same university, had killed his father shortly before the massacre in the Kladno area, about thirty kilometers from the capital. “There is no indication that this crime has any connection to international terrorism,” said Czech Interior Minister Vit Rakusan, trying to reassure people shocked by what politicians and observers have described as the worst tragedy in the history of the country refer to the Czech Republic. And Czech President Petr Pavel was also “shocked” and expressed his condolences on X.
Overnight, Czech police identified 13 of the 14 victims of the massacre at Charles University's Faculty of Literature and Philosophy. Among the 25 injured there are three foreigners, but none with Italian citizenship: the information was confirmed to ANSA by the Czech Foreign Ministry. The government has declared tomorrow, December 23rd, a national day of mourning.
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“It was a premeditated violent attack,” said police chief Martin Vondrasek, while the insane sentences of a kind of diary that the murderer had written on Telegram in the last few days were already circulating in the media. “Let me introduce myself, my name is David and I want to take part in a school shooting and possibly commit suicide… I always wanted to kill, I thought I would become a madman in the future,” but “I realized it “It is more convenient to commit a mass massacre than to be a serial killer,” Kozak wrote on the social network, with bright eyes and a clean face like a boy in the photo that stands out on all sites. A disturbing, psychiatric profile of a boy who, again on Telegram, said he was inspired by Alina Afanaskina, a 14-year-old Russian girl who shot a classmate in early December, injured five other people and then killed herself. Another episode is also a source of inspiration: the school shooting in Kazan, Tatarstan, in May 2021, in which nine people, including seven students, were killed and more than 20 were injured.
Among the paranoid delirium that floods the platforms every day, no one noticed the boy who posted on December 17th: “I hate the world and want to leave as much pain as possible.” The police are checking the authenticity of the messages and has now reconstructed the events of the crime, which shows how carefully Kozak planned the massacre. The carnage began that morning with the discovery of the father's lifeless body at 12:40 p.m. in his house about thirty kilometers from Prague. The alerted police evacuated a university building at 2 p.m. where the suspect was supposed to go to class. But Kozak taunted the officers by walking to another building where he opened fire, triggering the massacre. There were 15 dead and 24 injured on the ground, a dozen of them in serious condition. At 3:20 p.m., the police chief said, the murderer's body was found on the ledge of the building. It is not clear whether he committed suicide or was killed by officials, who were working to name all the victims.
The shock in the city and the countryside was intense.
Terror at the university. “We locked ourselves in the library and hid under the table. We all remained silent and wrote to our families, to the police,” one of the witnesses said on social media, explaining that the management of the Faculty of Arts had sent emails telling students how to move and where to barricade themselves can. What remains of these moments of panic is the symbolic image of an unnecessarily announced massacre: a group of students huddled together on a ledge in front of a window of the university building.
Still silent.
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