Day of mourning declared after 14 killed in Prague university shooting

The Czech Republic has declared Saturday a day of mourning after a 24-year-old student killed 14 people and wounded 25 others at his Prague university in what is believed to be the worst mass shooting in the Czech Republic’s modern history.

The death toll from Thursday’s shooting at Charles University in the city centre stood at 14, the interior minister, Vit Rakušan, said on Czech television on Friday. Authorities said three foreign nationals, two from the United Arab Emirates and one from the Netherlands, were among 25 wounded.

The city’s police chief, Martin Vondrášek, on Thursday described the shooting as “a premeditated violent attack”.

Law enforcement agencies on Friday confirmed the 24-year-old suspect’s name as David K. He has been named by local media as David Kozák, a student at the philosophy department building where the shooting took place.

Vondrášek said the suspect was believed to have first killed his father, whose body had been found at his home in a town west of Prague, and then continued his attacks at the university.

The police chief described the suspect as an excellent student with no criminal record. He said the gunman received “devastating injuries” but it was not immediately clear if he killed himself or was shot and killed by the police.

Vondrášek said the attacker “got inspired by a similar terrible event abroad”, without giving more details.

Rakušan said there was no indication the killings, which took place at the university’s faculty of arts building, had “any connection with international terrorism”.

The shooting took place near a busy tourist area in Prague’s Old Town, a minute’s walk from the historic Old Town Square. As the attack unfolded, several students posted pictures of doors inside the university barricaded shut. Others clambered on to narrow ledges in a desperate attempt to flee the shooter.

Jakob Weizman, a journalist and master’s student, described scenes of panic inside and outside the university. “I think the shooter went from inside of the faculty to the outside to the balcony where he was shooting on people from outside,” the 25-year-old said. “There were people trying to escape over the ledge.”

Police showed body-camera footage of special police units storming the university building, searching corridors and rooms and administering first aid to victims.

Early on Friday, with the scene of the shooting still sealed off by police, people could be seen lighting candles to mourn the victims at an impromptu vigil by the university headquarters. The country’s prime minister, Petr Fiala, and the interior minister laid flowers in front of the university headquarters, where a provisional memorial for the victims has been created.

The police said they possessed “relevant information” that the shooter was also involved in a separate double murder of a man and his two-month-old daughter in the east of Prague earlier this month.

Police said the suspect owned a number of firearms.

Gun crime is relatively rare in the Czech Republic, but the country has been an outlier in Europe because of its efforts to loosen gun laws. The central European country is the only one on the continent with a legal right to bear arms, but citizens first have to prove their competence through a series of tests before acquiring weapons.

In December 2019, a 42-year-old gunman killed six people at a hospital waiting room in the eastern city of Ostrava, and in 2015 a 63-year-old man shot seven men and a woman dead in the south-eastern town of Uhersky Brod.

The Czech president said he was “shocked by the events” of Thursday and gave his condolences to the families and relatives of the victims.

European leaders also sent their condolences. “Shocked by the senseless violence of the shooting that claimed several lives today in Prague,” the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on X. “We stand and mourn with you.”