Police seek motive in Prague mass shooting

PRAGUE — Czech authorities sought a motive on Friday in a student’s gun attack at a Prague university, where tearful mourners have left a sea of candles to grieve for the 14 victims.

The gunfire on Thursday at the Charles University’s Faculty of Arts sparked frantic scenes of students running from the attack that was the Czech Republic’s worst shooting in decades.

A makeshift memorial of hundreds of candles lit by tearful students flickered outside the university on Friday as the school, families and friends started to publish the names of the victims.

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

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

The gunman, a 24-year-old student, killed himself after shooting dead 13 people and wounding 25 others. One of the wounded later died in hospital.

Police said he also wounded three people in the street and damaged two cars as he was shooting from a balcony.

Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said a Dutch national and two citizens of the United Arab Emirates were wounded in the attack.

Police officer Josef Jerabek said the gunman killed himself when he “felt the loop tightening” as the police approached him after the carnage.

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

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

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

The government has declared a national day of mourning on Saturday, with flags on official buildings to be flown at half-mast and people asked to observe a minute’s silence at noon.

‘Huge arsenal’

The gunman, previously unknown to the police, had a “huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition”, Police Chief Martin Vondrasek said after the killings on Thursday.

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

Police started a search for the student even before the mass shooting as they had found his murdered father and the student’s note saying he is planning to kill himself in Prague.

They started the search at a Faculty of Arts building where he was expected to attend a lecture, but he went instead to the faculty’s main building nearby.

Police learned about the shooting at around 14:00 GMT and sent a rapid response unit to the scene. Twenty minutes later, the gunman was dead.

Vondrasek said the gunman’s social media account showed he was inspired by a “similar case that happened in Russia”, without providing further details.

Following a search at the gunman’s home, police drew a link between him and the murder of a young man and his two-month-old daughter during a walk in a Prague forest on December 15, whose investigation stalled on a lack of evidence.

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

‘It could have been me’

The shooting at Charles University, which sits near major tourist sites like the 14th-century Charles Bridge, was the deadliest since the Czech Republic emerged as an independent state in 1993.

Prime Minister Petr Fiala said there was “no justification for this horrendous act”.

Support poured in from across the world as Pope Francis, US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Britain’s King Charles and many others have sent 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 told AFP.

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