In the Czech Republic, it is a day of mourning for the murder of 14 people at a university in the center of Prague.
In the shooting at the Faculty of Philosophy in the center of Prague, history student David K. killed 14 students and lecturers on the spot with a rifle and then himself, wounded 25 and one injured person died later in the hospital, according to the definitive report of the crime, said Czech Minister of the Interior Vit Rakušan.
According to the minister, there are no foreign nationals among the dead, while according to the police statement, two citizens of the UAE and one of the Netherlands are among the dead. Among the injured were three passers-by who were wounded when the assailant, fleeing from the police on the roof of the building from the terrace, shot at people on the street in the tourist center of Prague, where the Faculty of Philosophy of the Charles University in Prague is located.
Previously, David K. killed his father in the village of Hostounj near Prague and then sent a text message to his friend that he was going to kill himself, which is why the police went in search of him and evacuated the side building of the Faculty of Philosophy in the afternoon where he was giving a lecture, but the attacker instead that into the main building, where there were no police, brought a bag with several weapons and ammunition and started shooting people on the 4th floor.
“This type of attack is difficult to predict. I don’t want to be fatalistic, but in some cases it cannot be prevented,” Minister Rakušan said at the press conference.
Earlier, at a press conference, the head of criminal investigators who investigate murders in Prague, Aleš Strah, admitted that the Prague police only had a few days to prevent this tragedy, because the attacker from the university was on the list of suspects based on footage from cameras in the forest in the Klanovice district on the outskirts Prague in the investigation of the murder of a Czech and his baby who were walking in the forest seven days ago.
“Among about 4,000 people we checked was this 24-year-old student. He was not from Prague but from Central Bohemia and his turn was later. We only needed a few days to prevent this tragic event in Prague,” Strah said.
The killer from the Faculty of Philosophy had a proper license to own eight weapons, two of which were rifles – the shotgun he used to kill himself and the civilian variant of the assault rifle on the AR-15 platform, which is used in archery or hunting, but not in the automatic version that in the Czech Republic they must not hold.
For the adapted version, which costs over 6,000 euros, in addition to the usual license, additional police approval is necessary, which David K. obtained without any problems because he does not appear in any register of investigated or punished and convicted persons, not even in the register of debtors.
Minister Rakušan warned that no, not even the strictest regulations on the carrying of weapons are able to completely prevent such attacks by lone shooters and emphasized that the Czech regulations are strict enough, more so than in some other countries.
According to the minister, the main problem now is the fake news, disinformation and rumors that are spreading about this tragedy, so that the Ministry had to deny that the attacker was Ukrainian or the comments from Russian networks and the Russian media that he shot with a sniper rifle manufactured by Ukraine.
Czech officials also appealed to the media not to indulge in sensational reporting and out of respect for the families not to go into tabloid details and also not to transmit misinformation like when they reported that several policemen were injured or killed in a shootout with an attacker.
The police, as announced by its chief Martin Vondrasek, opened an investigation against eight people who reacted to yesterday’s mass murder with threats of violence, among them the case of a 14-year-old boy in Olomouc in the south of the Czech Republic who talked about how he was going to shoot everyone in his elementary school.
The police have already introduced stricter preventive measures to protect the so-called soft targets such as schools and hospitals, and the minister said that there will be more policemen with long pipes on the streets, while in that tourist part of the city where synagogues and the old former Jewish ghetto are close, stricter measures were introduced already in the fall after the Hamas attack on Israel.
Tightened security measures will last at least until January 1, Beta writes.
