1 of 3 Fourteen people died in the attack in Prague Photo: EPA Fourteen people died in the attack in Prague Photo: EPA
Professor Radek Samik was teaching a course at Charles University in Prague when a gunman entered the building and began shooting.
While he was trapped in a room on the ground floor, he suddenly heard numerous gunshots.
Knowing something was wrong, Samik and his students stayed in the classroom and were unable to leave while a man carried out the worst mass shooting in the history of the Czech Republic.
In an upstairs classroom sat Jakob Weizman, a journalist and university student.
He was taking a language test in a small room accompanied by a teacher when he heard gunshots and screams.
In a panic, the two locked themselves in the classroom. He posted a photo on X (formerly Twitter) showing them using chairs and tables to protect themselves.
Five minutes later, the gunman tried to open the classroom door. “He went through every classroom to see if there were people he could kill,” Weizman told the Guardian.
The couple was eventually removed from the building by police. “When we left, there was blood everywhere in the college,” he said.
Video footage posted on social media shows people hanging from balcony railings during the attack and then jumping several meters to escape the gunfire.
2 of 3 Photo: BBC Photo: BBC
“The students had difficulty opening the window… So they broke the window to get out,” Professor Radek Samik told the BBC. He says he saw people having difficulty walking after jumping from the building.
Another video posted on social media showed someone outside the building shouting at the gunman, who was making his way to the balcony to get the attacker's attention.
“I'm here, shoot here, come here!” one person shouts in Czech. “I am here, here, look! And he's shooting at us now. I don’t want him shooting people.”
University professor Sergei Medvedev was evacuated from the campus auditorium along with his students during the shooting.
“I was giving a talk at the time and at first I didn’t notice what was happening because there was so much noise,” he said.
“I think the students listened better because I concentrated a lot on my speech, on my presentation. Once we were in the auditorium, we understood that something big was happening. There was still nothing on the internet, nothing in the press or on social media. Then, at some point, the special forces invaded.”
3 of 3 Friends and family have erected a makeshift memorial for the victims of the attack near the university Photo: GETTY IMAGES Friends and family have erected a makeshift memorial for the victims of the attack near the university Photo: GETTY IMAGES
He said officers searched the room. “An hour later another police unit broke in, laid us on the floor, searched us and then we were taken out of the building.”
Outside the university, in an area frequented by tourists, Faig Jafarli, 27, was drinking coffee when he noticed a road near the university was closed.
Jafarli, a former Charles University student, said he wasn't sure what was happening until he saw a person holding up his hands through a university window.
When Jafarli realized that the people around him many of them tourists did not understand the police's instructions, he began “yelling at the tourists to run away”.
“The tourists didn’t understand anything, they thought it was some kind of film.”
The shooting began this Thursday (December 21) at around 3 p.m. in the building of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University near Jan Palach Square in the center of the Czech capital.
The gunman opened fire in the building's hallways and classrooms before shooting himself as security forces surrounded him, police said.
The victims of the attack have been identified, but their names have not been publicly released by police.
The Interior Ministry said the injured included three foreigners one Dutch and two from the United Arab Emirates.
According to police, the shooter is said to have killed his own father at another location.
He is also suspected of killing a 30yearold man and his twomonthold daughter. The two were found dead in a forest outside Prague on December 15th.
The attack on Thursday afternoon at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University is the worst shooting since the Czech Republic's independence 30 years ago.
The most recent gun attack occurred in December 2019 at a hospital in Ostrava, when a man opened fire in the waiting room of a trauma clinic, killing four men and two women.
In February 2015, a man opened fire in a restaurant in the town of Uhersky Brod. Eight people died in the attack.
Although gun attacks are rare in the Czech Republic, gun hunting is popular in the country.
In 2019, the Czech government tried unsuccessfully to lift an EU ban on semiautomatic shotguns for private use, imposed after a series of deadly jihadist attacks across Europe.
The journalist tells how he tried to distract the killer who attacked a university in Prague