Aged 24, the student killed 13 people during the shooting and injured 25 others, before committing suicide. A fourteenth person died of their injuries on Friday in hospital.
The police sought on Friday to understand the motivations which pushed a student the day before to kill 14 people at Charles University in Prague, the worst attack in the Czech Republic in its contemporary history.
Shocked by this killing, grieving residents of this rather peaceful capital improvised a memorial outside the university consisting of a multitude of candles in tribute to the dead while the police continued their investigation on the campus located in the center historical.
Aged 24, the student killed 13 people during the shooting and injured 25 others, before committing suicide. A fourteenth person died of their injuries on Friday in hospital.
“Thirteen people died at the scene (of the attack), we must add the 14th dead, who is the shooter. Another victim died in hospital”Interior Minister Vit Rakusan told reporters.
Earlier in the day, he said those killed had been identified.
The government declared a day of national mourning on December 23.
“Huge arsenal”
The police chief, Martin Vondrasek, explained earlier that the attacker, unknown to the justice system, had a “huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition” and that the rapid action of the police had prevented even greater carnage.
All of the people who died were shot inside the building and some of them were college classmates of the killer.
Vondrasek said police began searching for the student even before the shooting because his father’s body was found in the village of Hostoun, west of Prague.
The shooter “left for Prague saying he wanted to kill himself”he said, refusing to confirm whether he had actually killed his father.
Police searched a building at the Faculty of Arts where the murderer was supposed to report for a class, but he eventually went nearby, to the main faculty building.
It stands close to major tourist sites such as the 14th century Charles Bridge and the picturesque Old Town Square.
Police were informed of the shooting around 1400 GMT and immediately dispatched a response unit.
Twenty minutes later, the attacker was found dead.
Citing a social media investigation, Vondrasek said the shooter was inspired by a “similar case occurred in Russia”without going into details.
The official noted that police suspected the same student of having killed a young man and his two-month-old daughter in a pram during a walk in a forest in the eastern suburbs of Prague on December 15.
The investigation into this murder remained at an impasse until evidence uncovered in Hostoun linked him to this crime.
A “senseless” act
Support from local and international politicians poured in after the tragedy.
“Nothing can justify this horrible act”commented Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, while United States President Joe Biden denounced a shooting “insane”.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky offered their condolences.
According to Mr. Rakusan, the attack has no connection with the “international terrorism” and the student was acting alone.
In 2015, a 63-year-old man shot dead seven men and a woman before ending his life in a restaurant in Uhersky Brod, a town in the southeast of the Czech Republic. In 2019, a man killed six people in the waiting room of a hospital in Ostrava, a city in the east of this country, and a woman died a few days later. The murderer then committed suicide.