At least 15 dead, 20 injured after shooting in Prague

Student gunman takes own life after rampage

Fourteen people were killed and more than 20 others wounded in a shooting rampage at Charles University in the Czech Republic on Thursday, the authorities said. The gunman, a 24year-old student in world history at the university, also killed himself after the shooting spree in central Prague.

Police say they believe he first killed his father in their family home in a village near the town of Kladno, outside Prague, Ondrej Moravcik, a spokesperson for the Czech police, said in an interview. Some of the injured were in critical condition, he added.

The gunman was partly identified by police as David K. European police officials often give only a first name and last initial for privacy reasons. Speaking at a news conference in Prague, the chief of the national police force, Martin Vondrasek, said the assailant “got inspired by a similar terrible event abroad.” He did not specify where.

But the authorities said they did not believe that the gunman’s actions were connected to international or domestic terrorism.

Radek Simik, an associate professor in linguistics at Charles University, said he was in the middle of a lesson in his classroom on the first floor when he and his five students heard shouting coming from the corridor.

“We thought it was a drunk guy or a rioter or something,” he said. As the sound got louder, he realized it was the authorities saying: “Police! Get out!” Then, a few minutes later, the shooting started, and he and his students rushed out of the building.

“The shooting continued when we were standing outside of the building,” he said. He and his students watched police carry out the injured and others who appeared to be dead, he said.

The authorities were investigating whether violent, expletive-laden Russian-language messages posted on Telegram under the name David Kozak were connected to the gunman, the police chief added.

One message said that two mass shootings in Russia had provided inspiration — one this month at a school in Bryansk near the border with Ukraine and the second in 2021 in Kazan, capital of the Russian region of Tatarstan.

“I was very inspired by Alina … very much,” a message posted on Dec. 10 said, three days after a 14-year-old Russian girl, Alina Afanaskina, opened fire on her classmates, killing two of them, with a pump shotgun in Bryansk. But, the message continued: “She certainly did not kill enough. I will try to fix that.”

Another post the same day said: “I always wanted to kill. I thought I would be a maniac in the future.”

A message on Telegram posted under the name of David Kozak a day earlier said, “This will be my diary as I go toward school shooting.” That message was edited on Thursday, but it is not clear how.

The channel went “private” late Thursday after the shooting. By that point, David K. was already dead.

If the gunman and the Telegram writer were the same person, it was not immediately clear how a native-born Czech who grew up in a small village in central Bohemia would have acquired a mastery of the Russian language, including faddish slang used by young Russians online and a rich vocabulary of swear words.

The governor of the Prague region, Bohuslav Svoboda, said the gunman had fallen from the roof of the university’s faculty of arts building after opening fire on Jan Palach Square, an area of manicured lawns adjacent to the Vltava River that cuts through the Czech capital.

Police said the arts building, in Prague’s Old Town, had been evacuated. The square next to it was sealed off. Videos posted on social media showed people running away.

Moravcik, the spokesperson for the Czech police, said of the suspect: “He had a lot of guns, special army guns, but all of these guns were legal.”

It was Europe’s worst mass shooting since back-to-back massacres in Serbia in May killed 17 people and wounded more than 20.