WARSAW – The recent attacks at Polish schools appear to have been “spontaneous acts” fueled by the online glorification of violence, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Sunday.
Three school attacks occurred within four days in Poland’s central Mazovian province this week. One person was killed and numerous others, including children, were injured.
By Sunday morning, police had detained 117 people nationwide for possessing knives or other dangerous weapons, or for making threats against schools and students. Officers also inspected about 64,000 schools.
“We are not dealing with any group organized on a big scale,” Tusk said during a Sunday morning crisis meeting with government officials and security services. “These are very often spontaneous actions inspired by online activity.”
He said authorities had seen a global and Polish increase in the fascination with violence over recent months and years.
Tusk linked the incidents to what he called “nihilistic violence,” a term authorities use for attacks motivated by a nihilistic worldview and hostility toward humanity rather than by defined political objectives.
In Poland, Tusk said, “some of the people detained are active in the ultraright environment.” Authorities have also identified a rise in online searches for Nazi material and for information about “mass killers who have become idols online,” he said.
The prime minister described the trend as a “civilizational phenomenon,” warning that children who play video games, including ordinary mainstream titles, or follow crime stories are encountering increasingly graphic and pervasive violence.
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Kacper Rekawek, a senior researcher at the International Center for Counterterrorism in The Hague, told The Associated Press that the events fit a copycat pattern forming “a long trail of attackers going back to at least 2019, if not decades earlier.” He cited Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Rekawek said one suspect in the latest Polish attacks used imagery and aesthetics associated with Tarrant. As a result, he argued, the incidents should be viewed “within the confines of essentially terrorist behavior.”
Tusk said police inspections at schools would continue into next week to guard against copycat attacks by children exposed to reports about the earlier incidents and who might develop “stupid and unsafe thoughts” about imitating them.
He said Polish society faced significant work ahead, particularly for parents and teachers, who must discuss children’s online experiences and explain that fascination with — and participation in — such online practices can have “very negative consequences.”
On Wednesday, a 19-year-old student at a vocational school in Mazovian province attacked fellow students, teachers and passersby with a sharp object, injuring nine people before being arrested nearby. The next day, a 15-year-old killed a school custodian and wounded two others with a knife at his former school in the same province. On Saturday, a 21-year-old woman injured three people at a post-secondary school in Warsaw.
Rumors that the attacks were coordinated and that additional violence would occur on a so-called “bloody Friday” circulated through parents’ online groups and mainstream media. In response, 59 schools across Poland — most of them in Mazovian province — suspended classes as a precaution on Friday.
Among those detained Friday were a 14-year-old boy in Warsaw found carrying a knife with a concealed blade and 11 firecrackers, and a 16-year-old who arrived at school with a butterfly knife in his backpack, police said.
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