Austrian shooter suspect posted online just before school massacre, media say
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Emergency personnel standing in front of the site of a shooting at a school in Austria on June 11. The police described the suspect as an introvert.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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VIENNA – The 21-year-old man behind Austria’s worst school shooting posted on social media from the building just before he shot dead 10 people, then killed himself this week, Austrian newspapers reported on June 13.
The police described the Austrian as an introvert and an avid player of online shooting games who had largely withdrawn from the outside world before he carefully planned the June 10 attack
Newspapers Heute and Kronen Zeitung published details of a photo the young man apparently took inside a toilet cubicle with a timestamp minutes before the police said the attack began in the school in Graz, a city in the southern state of Styria.
The photo was published on X, they said.
Kronen Zeitung said the man had an interest in the 1999 US Columbine school massacre in Colorado carried out by two teenage shooters and that he apparently used a photo of one of the pair on his profile with his online gaming pseudonym.
Heute said the man had also published pictures of the pistol and the shotgun he would go on to use during the shooting on other social media.
A spokesman for the police in Styria declined to confirm the reports or whether the man had social media accounts.
The police have been scouring the perpetrator’s electronic devices, and said on June 12 that they had not discovered any video of the high school shooting on his mobile phone. REUTERS
