Father’s guns used in school shooting

A 17-year-old armed with a shotgun and a pistol opened fire at a Houston-area high school yesterday, killing 10 people, most of them students, authorities said, in America’s deadliest such attack since the massacre in Florida that gave rise to a campaign by teenagers for gun control.

The suspected shooter, who was in custody on murder charges, also had explosive devices that were found in the school and nearby, said Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who called the attack ‘‘one of the most heinous attacks that we’ve ever seen in the history of Texas schools’’.

Investigators offered no immediate motive for the shooting. Abbott said the assailant intended to kill himself but gave up and told police that he did not have the courage to take his own life.

The deaths are all but certain to reignite the national debate over gun regulations, coming just three months after the Parkland, Florida attack that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

‘‘It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like that eventually it was going to happen here, too,’’ Santa Fe High School student Paige Curry told Houston television station KTRK.

‘‘I wasn’t surprised. I was just scared.’’

Another 10 people were wounded at the school in Santa Fe, a city of about 13,000 people roughly 48km southeast of Houston, Abbott said. The wounded included a school police officer who was the first to confront the suspect and was shot in the arm.

Hospitals reported treating a total of 14 people for injuries related to the shooting.

Zachary Muehe, a sophomore, said he was in his art class when he heard three loud booms.

Muehe told The New York Times that a student he knew from football was armed with a shotgun and wearing a shirt emblazoned with the slogan ‘‘Born to Kill’’.

The gunman yelled ‘‘Surprise!’’ before he started shooting, according to Texas Congressman Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The suspect was identified as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who appeared to have no prior arrests or confrontations with law enforcement. A woman who answered the phone at a number associated with the Pagourtzis family declined to comment.

‘‘Give us our time right now, thank you,’’ she said.

Pagourtzis made his initial court appearance yesterday by video link from the Galveston County Jail. A judge denied bond.

Pagourtzis played on the junior varsity football team and was a member of a dance squad with a local Greek Orthodox church. Acquaintances described him as quiet and unassuming, an avid video game player who routinely wore a black trenchcoat and black boots to class.

The suspect obtained the shotgun and a .38-calibre handgun from his father, who owned them legally, Abbott said. It was not clear whether the father knew his son had taken them.

The assailant’s homemade explosives included pipe bombs, at least one Molotov cocktail and pressurecooker bombs similar to those used in the Boston Marathon attack, authorities said.

Survivors of the Florida attack took to social media to express grief and outrage.

‘‘My heart is so heavy for the students of Santa Fe High School. It’s an all too familiar feeling no one should have to experience. I am so sorry this epidemic touched your town – Parkland will stand with you now and forever,’’ Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Jaclyn Corin said in a tweet.

She also directed her frustration at US President Donald Trump, writing: ‘‘Our children are being MURDERED and you’re treating this like a game. This is the 22nd school shooting just this year. DO SOMETHING.’’

Yesterday’s attack was the deadliest in Texas since a man with a semiautomatic rifle attacked a rural church late last year, killing more than two dozen people.

There were few prior clues about Pagourtzis’s behaviour, Abbott said, but the teen wrote in journals of wanting to carry out such an attack and then to end his own life.