Not less than eight people were killed in a shooting at a faculty within the Austrian city of Graz on Tuesday, and the suspected perpetrator also died, town’s mayor said.
Mayor Elke Kahr described the events as a “terrible tragedy,” the Austria Press Agency reported. It added that the fatalities were seven students and one adult. Kahr said that many individuals were taken to hospitals with injuries.
Police said they consider the assailant acted alone.
Special forces were amongst those sent to the BORG Dreierschützengasse highschool, a few kilometer (over half a mile) from Graz’s historic center, after a call at 10 a.m. At 11.30 a.m., police wrote on social network X that the varsity had been evacuated and everybody had been taken to a protected meeting point. They wrote that the situation was “secured” and there is no such thing as a longer believed to be any danger.
Police deployed in large numbers, with police and other emergency vehicles guarding the world around the varsity and with at the very least one police helicopter flying above the world, based on photos published by the regional newspaper Kleine Zeitung.
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Graz, Austria’s second-biggest city, is situated within the southeast of the country and has about 300,000 inhabitants.
Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said the shooting “is a national tragedy that deeply shocks our whole country.”
“There aren’t any words for the pain and grief that each one of us — the entire of Austria — feel now,” he wrote in an announcement posted on X.
President Alexander Van der Bellen said that “this horror can’t be captured in words.”
“These were young individuals who had their whole lives ahead of them. A teacher who accompanied them on their way,” he said.
Interior Minister Gerhard Karner was on his method to Graz.
“Schools are symbols for youth, hope and the long run,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X. “It is tough to bear when schools turn out to be places of death and violence.”
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