Investigators on Friday were trying to establish the motive for the deadly shooting in central Prague the day before, the worst mass shooting in the Czech Republic since World War II.
Gunfire that erupted Thursday at Charles University turned the historic center of one of Europe’s most serene cities into a scene of carnage, its festive Christmas atmosphere ruined by the screams and din of sirens. Tourists ran for safety while some students barricaded themselves in classrooms. Others climbed out of windows, hiding on the windowsill of a building.
The gunman killed 14 people and wounded 25 others, according to the revised official death toll released Friday. The gunman, a 24-year-old student, fatally shot himself after police surrounded him on the roof of the building, authorities said at a news conference Friday.
The Czech Republic canceled football and hockey matches – usually fixtures of the pre-Christmas calendar – and declared Saturday a day of national mourning.
The university’s Faculty of Arts, the building where the shooting occurred, remained closed Friday morning, but traffic had resumed around the nearby Jan Palach square. An overnight thunderstorm followed by morning rain added to the gloomy atmosphere in the capital.
After an emergency government meeting on Thursday evening, the Czech president, Petr Pavel, said he was gripped by “impotent rage at the completely unnecessary loss of life.” He launched an appeal for national unity and called for vigilance against the spread of disinformation, which has long been a serious problem in the central European country.
Authorities identified the gunman as David K. and ruled out any links to international or domestic terrorism, telling a news conference Thursday that he appeared to have acted alone. Police said they were investigating whether the gunman was linked to a series of expletive-laden messages promising mass murder that had been posted in Russian on the Telegram messaging platform under the name David Kozak.
“I hate the world and I want to leave as much pain as possible,” read a message published three days before Thursday’s massacre. “I want to do a school shooting and possibly suicide.”
The messages, seen by the New York Times, were all written in Russian, apparently by a native speaker expert in vulgar slang. If the gunman and the Telegram writer were the same person, it was unclear how a Czech citizen growing up in a small central Bohemian village could have acquired such mastery of the language.
The Czech Republic has been infested with angry, divisive trolls, a phenomenon that some experts have linked to online attacks by Russia. Relations between Prague and Moscow soured sharply after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the January election of Pavel, a former general who, unlike his Kremlin-friendly predecessor, Milos Zeman, he is a staunch supporter of Ukraine and NATO.
On Friday, the commander of the Czech Army’s Cyber and Cyber Forces Group, Ivo Zelinka, warned the public against sharing unverified information about the gunman online.
The Czech Republic, unlike most European countries, has a relatively permissive approach to gun ownership. Licensing rules are strict, but the right to protect oneself and others by using guns is enshrined in the country’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, the closest European equivalent to the Second Amendment in the United States.
While there were some calls on social media for gun laws to be tightened in response to Thursday’s rampage, they were quickly dismissed as an attempt to inject politics into the nation’s grief and denounced as disrespectful to the dead.
This is in stark contrast to that of Serbia, where back-to-back mass shootings in May killed 17 people and injured more than 20. Serbia also has strict rules on gun ownership, but following the massacres it was shaken by Public debate on the possibility of gun ownership should be further limited.
