No charges for Spanish boy who killed teacher
13-year-old armed with machete, crossbow too young to be jailed, authorities say
BARCELONA, SPAIN— A 13-year-old Spanish boy armed with a crossbow and machete killed a substitute teacher and wounded four other people at his school in Barcelona on Monday, police said.
The boy, who was undergoing a psychiatric examination, will not face criminal charges because he is under the age of 14, authorities said.
Two other teachers and two students were injured.
The attack, which took place just after 9:30 a.m., sowed terror in the high school in a working-class neigh- bourhood of Spain’s second-largest city. “We were just starting the class and suddenly we heard screams,” said student Gemma Jarque. “So we shut ourselves inside our classroom in order to be safe.”
A regional police spokeswoman said the boy had a crossbow and a machete.
However, she was unable to say which weapon caused the man’s death.
Authorities did not disclose details of how the attack played out. But Jarque said she and others hid in her classroom after hearing the screams, and left along with other students only after a fire alarm sounded.
“We saw the teacher lying on the floor in a pool of blood,” she said.
Another student, Paula Amayuelas, said she knew the suspect, who police did not identify because of his age. Amayuelas said the boy “didn’t have problems but he was kind of a loner . . . Other students would pick on him.”
Parents and students gathered and hugged each other in stunned silence outside the school for students ages 12-16.
The teacher killed was a substitute who had worked at the school for about a week, students said.
Though children below 14 are not held legally responsible for crimes and cannot be jailed or placed in juvenile detention centres, they can be sent to mental health institutions, said a spokesman for Spain’s justice ministry.
Following his detention, the boy was taken to a hospital for a psychiatric examination, said Jose Miguel Company, a spokesman for the Barcelona prosecutor’s office.
“He was very disturbed and saying strange and incoherent things,” said Company, adding the examination will try to determine if the boy has psychiatric problems or whether he was faking them.
School attacks are extremely rare in Spain. A national police spokesman could not recall any fatal school attacks in the country’s recent history.