Czech police patrol public areas, university cancels lectures after shooting

PRAGUE - Czech police tightened security around schools and other public buildings across the country, and Prague’s Charles University cancelled all lectures and events one day after a student shooter killed 13 people at a university building on Dec 21.

The shooting was the worst-ever such event in the central European country where many hold guns, some of them sports or hunting rifles, but multiple shootings are rare.

Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said police have identified the dead, and that no foreigners were among them. The wounded included two United Arab Emirates citizens and one from the Netherlands.

“There are 13 victims of the crazed gunman and one of the dead is the gunman himself,” Mr Rakusan told Czech Television. The authorities had previously reported 14 victims at the university.

People have been lighting candles outside the university’s mediaeval downtown headquarters since the evening of Dec 21, and leaders of the nation’s universities planned to pay respects there in the morning of Dec 22.

“Starting today, we have adopted countrywide preventative measures in relation to soft targets and schools,” police said on social network X, previously known as Twitter.

“We do not have information about any concrete threat... This is a signal we are here and prepared.”

The authorities provided no fresh information on the condition of those wounded in the attack.

The 24-year-old shooter died on Dec 21 at the university building, possibly after killing himself or by police bullet, police said.

The police said on Dec 21 that the man, who had a gun licence and a clean criminal record, was a student at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, where the shooting took place.

They said the suspect, whom they asked not to be named, had killed his father at home outside Prague before travelling to the capital.

The police had information he intended to kill himself and were searching for him at another university building where he was due to attend a lecture.

But the shooter instead went to the main Faculty of Arts building on a busy square across the river from Prague Castle and just hundreds of metres from the Old Town Square, one of Europe’s major tourist attractions.

Media images showed students evacuating a building with their hands in the air, and others perched on a ledge near the roof trying to hide from the attacker. Students also 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 is actually going on. I wasn’t ready to admit that something like that could happen in Prague,” he said.

It was only once he saw police officers with automatic rifles that he knew it was serious, he said.

“They shouted at me to run away.”

The government declared Dec 23 a national day of mourning.

Police president Martin Vondrasek said on Dec 21 that the police were looking into unverified information on the shooter’s possible connection with a social media account citing inspiration by a mass shooting in Russia, but there has been no confirmation of that.

Though mass gun violence is unusual in the Czech Republic, the nation has been rocked by some instances in recent years.

A 63-year-old man shot seven men and a woman dead in 2015 before killing himself at a restaurant in the south-eastern town of Uhersky Brod.

In 2019, a man killed six people in the waiting room of a hospital in the eastern city of Ostrava, with another woman dying days later. The man shot himself dead about three hours after the attack. REUTERS, AFP