Czech gunman kills 14 people at Prague university
The attack was the worst mass shooting in the eastern European country's history.
PRAGUE:Â A 24-year-old Czech student shot dead his father then killed 14 people and wounded 25 others at his Prague university on Thursday (Dec 21) before possibly killing himself, police said, marking the country's worst-ever mass shooting.
The gunman is also suspected in the killings of another man and his two-month-old daughter who were found last week shot dead in woods in a village outside Prague, the city's police chief, Martin Vondrasek, said.
Authorities - who discovered a large arsenal of weapons at a downtown Prague Charles University building - were tipped off earlier in the day that the man was likely heading to Prague from his town in the Kladno region outside the capital with intentions of taking his own life.
Shortly after that, the shooter's father was found dead.
"We have very fresh unconfirmed information from an account on a social network that he was supposedly inspired by one terrorist attack in Russia in the autumn of this year," Vondrasek told reporters, adding the shooter was a legal holder of several firearms.
"It was a pre-mediated horrific act that started in the Kladno region and unfortunately ended here."
Police asked not to reveal the man's identity but his name reported by some Czech media matched a police search report.
Authorities sealed off the square and area adjacent to the faculty building, in a busy historical district down the hill from Prague Castle on a popular street leading to Old Town Square.
Media images showed students evacuating the building with their hands in the air, and others perched on a ledge near the roof trying to hide from the attacker while students barricaded classrooms with desks and chairs.
"We always thought that this was a thing that did not concern us. Now it turns out that, unfortunately, our world is also changing and the problem of the individual shooter is emerging here as well," Prague Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda told Czech Television.
The White House condemned the shooting and said the United States was ready to offer assistance. Leaders across Europe including France's Emmanuel Macron offered their support.
Witness Ivo Havranek, 43, told Reuters via Zoom that he initially thought the "couple of bangs" he heard might have come from loud tourists or a nearby movie set.
"Then suddenly there were students and teachers running out of the building. I went through the crowd not realising what was actually going on. I wasn't ready to admit that something like that could happen in Prague," he said. Only once he saw police officers with automatic rifles, he knew it was serious, he said.
"They shouted at me to run."
Prime Minister Petr Fiala cancelled a trip to the east of the country and the government held an emergency meeting attended by President Petr Pavel and the head of the country's counterintelligence service.
Gun crime is relatively rare in the Czech Republic. In December 2019, a 42-year-old gunman killed six people in a hospital waiting room in the eastern Czech city of Ostrava before fleeing and fatally shooting himself, police said.
In 2015, a man fatally shot eight people and then killed himself at a restaurant in Uhersky Brod