Czechs mourn Prague university shooting where student killed 14 people and himself

PRAGUE Flags on public buildings flew at half-mast on Dec 23 and masses were scheduled across the Czech Republic for a day of national mourning after

a deadly shooting at Prague’s Charles University

– the worst in the country in decades.

Two days earlier, a 24-year-old student opened fire at the Faculty of Arts, killing 13 people and then himself. Another person died in hospital later on.

The gunfire sparked frantic scenes of students running from the attack.

The government asked Czechs to observe a minute’s silence at noon, and bells were due to ring at churches across the European Union and Nato member country.

“It is hard to find the words to express condemnation on the one hand and, on the other, the pain and sorrow that our entire society is feeling in these days before Christmas,” said Prime Minister Petr Fiala.

Tearful students lit thousands of candles at makeshift memorials at the Faculty of Arts and the university headquarters nearby.

The school, families and friends have started to publish the names of the victims, students and teachers alike.

“This is extremely cruel news for us all,” the Institute of Musicology said on Facebook after learning that its 49-year-old director, Ms Lenka Hlavkova, a mother of two, was among the victims.

Other victims included Finnish literature expert Jan Dlask and student Lucie Spindlerova.

The gunman also wounded 25 people, including three who were hit by bullets in the street as he fired from a balcony.

A Dutch national and two citizens of the United Arab Emirates were among the wounded.

Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said there was no link between the shooting and “international terrorism” and the perpetrator had acted on his own.

Huge arsenal

But the police have since detained four people, either for threatening to copy the attack or for approving it.

Police guards at selected sites, including schools, will be in place at least until Jan 1, Mr Rakusan said.

Police chief Martin Vondrasek said the gunman, previously unknown to the police, had a “huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition”.

He added that inspecting the crime scene was “the most shattering experience” in his 31 years of police service.

The police started a search for the student when they found his murdered father earlier on Dec 21.

The student told his friend that he was planning to kill himself in Prague.

The police searched a Faculty of Arts building where he was expected to attend a lecture, but he went instead to the faculty’s main building nearby.

The police learnt about the shooting around 3pm local time and sent a rapid response unit to the scene. Twenty minutes later, the gunman was dead.

Mr Vondrasek said the gunman was inspired by a similar shooting in Russia, citing his social media account.

It could have been me

Following a search at the gunman’s home, the police drew a link between him and the yet unresolved murder of a young man and his two-month-old daughter in a Prague forest on Dec 15.

“A ballistic analysis proved the gun used in the… forest was identical with a gun found at the university gunman’s home,” the police said on X, formerly Twitter.

This week’s shooting in Prague’s Unesco-listed historic centre was the deadliest since the Czech Republic emerged as an independent state in 1993.

Sympathy poured in from across the world, with Pope Francis, United States President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Britain’s King Charles and many others sending their condolences.

At the makeshift memorial, technical university student Antonin Volavka lit a candle to pay tribute to the dead.

“This could have happened to anyone. Really, it could have been me,” he said.

The Czech Republic is the world’s 12th safest country, according to the 2023 Global Peace Index, and mass gun violence is rare.

But in 2015, a man shot seven men and a woman dead before killing himself in a restaurant in the south-east, while another gunman killed seven people in an eastern hospital and then himself in 2019. AFP