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BERLIN – Czech police on Friday investigated why a 24-year-old student killed 14 people and injured 25 others in the worst shooting in the country's modern history.
The gunman's body was found “motionless” shortly after the rampage, and police said he died by suicide.
Among the injured are three foreigners – two from Saudi Arabia and one from the Netherlands. According to police, none of the dead were foreign nationals. The university where the attack took place, Charles University, was founded in 1348 and is the oldest and most prestigious university in the Czech Republic. It is extremely popular with foreign exchange students, including Americans.
Police have not released the identities of the victims. The Institute of Musicology at Charles University confirmed in a Facebook post that its director, Lenka Hlávková, was among the dead.
Citing unconfirmed information from social media, Czech police chief Martin Vondrášek said the shooter was inspired by a “similar case in Russia.” Earlier this month, a Russian teenager named Alina Afanaskina shot and killed a fellow student in the city of Bryansk before shooting herself. Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan said investigators do not suspect any connection to extremist ideologies or groups or to international terrorism.
The shooting is the fourth major mass killing by a lone gunman this year in Europe, where such attacks are considered shocking and rare. In May, two separate attacks in Serbia within a week shocked the nation and prompted the president to promise weapons reforms and “complete disarmament” of the country. In March, a gunman killed six people in a Jehovah's Witnesses hall in Hamburg.
“We always thought it was none of our business. Now it turns out that unfortunately our world is also changing and the problem of the individual shooter is also emerging here,” Prague Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda said on Czech television, according to Portal.
Authorities received a tip earlier Thursday that the suspect, who had no criminal record, had set off from his town in the nearby Kladno region to Prague “saying he wanted to kill himself.” His father was found dead soon afterwards.
Based on the tip, the police searched a building at the art faculty where the shooter was scheduled to attend a lecture. Instead, he went to the nearby main faculty building, where shots were fired around 3 p.m. local time on Thursday. The shooter had a “huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition,” police said.
Videos posted by witnesses on social media showed locals and tourists fleeing the area. The building where the shooting took place is on Jan Palach Square, a busy tourist area in Prague's Old Town, named after a Czech student who died by self-immolation in 1968 in protest against the Soviet occupation Windows fled before taking shelter at the edges of the building.
Video released by Czech police on Friday shows chaotic scenes of people and vehicles fleeing the square as police arrive and enter the building armed with assault rifles. The video shows police breaking down doors and clearing classrooms while students lie on the floor with their hands on their heads.
In a classroom you can see pairs of police officers treating the wounded and passing each other bandages and tourniquets. The wounded are blurred in the video. In another clip, police officers can be seen carrying a person on a stretcher across the square. The person can be heard whimpering in pain.
In an image reminiscent of school shootings across the US, a large group of students are escorted around the outside of a building with their hands raised. Police encourage people to do this during mass shootings to find out who is the shooter and who is not.
Petr Matejcek, a police officer, said the gunman shot himself on a university balcony, the Associated Press reported. Videos released by police show a blurred body lying on a balcony.
Late Thursday, police said they believed the gunman also killed a young man and his 2-month-old daughter in a stroller in a forest on the outskirts of Prague on Dec. 15, a case that has gripped the country in the busy last week.
Early Friday, as people lit candles at an impromptu vigil, the government declared December 23 a national day of mourning. Flags will fly at half-mast at official buildings and a minute's silence will be observed at 12 p.m.
As a preventative measure, police tightened security at schools and other “soft targets” on Friday, while Charles University canceled all lectures and events.
The shooting sparked condolences from world leaders. “The president and first lady pray for the families who lost loved ones and for everyone else affected by this senseless act of violence,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. “Federal authorities are in contact with Czech authorities as they investigate this incident.”
Although gun laws in the Czech Republic are more permissive compared to most European neighbors, even allowing concealed carry with a permit, the Czech Republic requires its citizens to undergo rigorous testing before they are allowed to obtain weapons.
Mass killings are rare, but they do happen. In 2019, a gunman killed six people at a Czech hospital in the city of Ostrava before turning the gun on himself. Four years earlier, a gunman shot eight people and himself in the town of Uherský Brod.
De Vynck reported from Brussels.