Key Points
- At least 14 people have been killed after a 24-year-old gunman attacked a university in Prague.
- Some two dozen others have been injured in the attack.
- It marks the worst shooting since the Czech Republic emerged as an independent state in 1993.
A 24-year-old Czech student has shot dead his father then killed 14 people and wounded 25 others at his Prague university before possibly taking his life, marking the country's worst-ever mass shooting.
The government declared a day of mourning across the central European country for December 23 to remember the victims, decided at a special cabinet meeting with Prime Minister Petr Fiala and President Petr Pavel.
"I would express my great sadness along with helpless anger at the unnecessary loss of so many young lives," Pavel said.
"I would like to express my sincere condolences to all relatives of the victims, to all who were at this tragic incident, the most tragic in the history of the Czech Republic."
Police - who discovered a large arsenal of weapons at the downtown Prague Charles University building where the shooting took place on Thursday afternoon - were tipped off earlier in the day the suspect 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, but then were called to the faculty's larger main building, arriving within minutes after reports of the shooting, Police President Martin Vondrasek said.
Police had "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."
Armed police on the balcony of the Charles University in central Prague. Source: Getty / Michal Cizek
Police said he acted alone, and Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said the shooting had no connection to international terrorism.
The shooting took place at Prague's Charles University. Source: Getty / Elmurod Usubaliev
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.
Czech Republic's deadliest shooting in decades
The worst shooting since the Czech Republic emerged as an independent state in 1993 prompted support from across the world.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen denounced "the senseless violence of the shooting that claimed several lives today".
French President Emmanuel Macron also expressed his "solidarity" with the Czech people, just like many other European leaders including Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Czech Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said that there was no link between the shooting and "international terrorism".
Police President Martin Vondrasek (left) and Interior Minister Vit Rakusan (right) speak to the press. Source: Getty / Stringer
'Our world is also changing'
"We always thought that this was a thing that did not concern us," Prague Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda told Czech Television.
"Now it turns out that, unfortunately, our world is also changing and the problem of the individual shooter is emerging here as well."
"It was terribly scary, there were a lot of policemen everywhere, who were shouting at us with submachine guns, telling us to run outside," she said.
Though mass gun violence is unusual in the Czech Republic, the nation has been rocked by some instances in recent years.
A 63-year-old man shot seven men and a woman dead in 2015 before killing himself in a restaurant in the southeastern town of Uhersky Brod.
In 2019, a man killed six people in the waiting room of a hospital in the eastern city of Ostrava, with another woman dying days later. The man shot himself dead about three hours after the attack.
