Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has shared his condolences to the families of the victims of a mass shooting in Prague.
According to local police, a 24-year-old Czech student shot dead his father then killed 14 people and wounding 25 others at his Prague university before killing himself, in what is the Czech Republic’s worst-ever mass shooting.
Mitsotakis took to X, formerly Twitter, to convey his heartfelt sympathy.
“Devastated by the news of the atrocious attack in Prague,” his post read.
“On behalf of the Greek people, I extend our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims, and our wishes for a speedy recovery to those injured.
“Our thoughts are with the people of Czechia.”
The city’s police chief, Martin Vondrasek says the gunman is also a suspect in the killings of another man and his two-month-old daughter, who were found last week shot dead in the woods in a village outside Prague.
Authorities – who discovered a large arsenal of weapons at a downtown Prague Charles University building – were tipped off earlier on Thursday that the man was likely heading to Prague from his town in the Kladno region outside the capital with intentions of taking his own life.
Shortly after that, the shooter’s father was found dead.
Police evacuated an arts faculty building where the shooter was due to attend a lecture on Thursday afternoon, but then were called to the faculty’s larger main building, arriving within minutes after reports of the shooting, Vondrasek said.
“We have very fresh unconfirmed information from an account on a social network that he was supposedly inspired by one terrorist attack in Russia in the autumn of this year,” Vondrasek told reporters, adding the shooter was a legal holder of several firearms.
“It was a premediated, horrific act that started in the Kladno region and unfortunately ended here.”
The gunman’s death was likely a suicide but authorities are also investigating whether he might have been killed by police who returned fire, Vondrasek said.
Police said he was a high-achieving student with no criminal record, and he acted alone.
Police asked not to reveal the man’s identity but his name reported by some Czech media matched a police search report.
Authorities sealed off the square and area adjacent to the faculty building, in a busy historical district down the hill from Prague Castle on a popular street leading to Old Town Square.
Media images showed students fleeing the building with their hands in the air, and others perched on a ledge near the roof trying to hide from the attacker while students barricaded classrooms with desks and chairs.
Gun crime is relatively rare in the Czech Republic. In December 2019, a 42-year-old gunman killed six people at a hospital waiting room in the eastern Czech city of Ostrava before fleeing and fatally shooting himself, police said.
In 2015, a man fatally shot eight people and then killed himself at a restaurant in Uhersky Brod.
“We always thought that this was a thing that did not concern us. Now it turns out that, unfortunately, our world is also changing and the problem of the individual shooter is emerging here as well,” Prague mayor Bohuslav Svoboda told Czech Television.
With AMNA, AAP*
