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The Czech Republic declared Saturday a day of mourning after a gunman killed 14 people in Prague in the country’s worst mass shooting in history.
David Kozak, 24, killed 14 people and injured 25 – ten seriously – during the deadly rampage in which he targeted students and tourists from the balcony of the Charles University’s philosophy building.
The Czech government announced tomorrow will be a day of mourning, with flags on official buildings to be flown at half-mast and people asked to observe a minute’s silence at noon (11am GMT).
Today, Charles University raised black flags in the victims’ honour and cancelled all lectures and events following the shooting.
People have been lighting candles outside the university’s medieval downtown headquarters since Thursday evening, and leaders of the nation’s universities planned to pay respects there later on Friday morning.
A chilling image shows Kozak dressed in black aiming a rifle at people below while standing on top of a faculty building
Other extraordinary images show terrified students cowering on a ledge high up on a faculty in a bid to hide from the gunman after others were told to barricade themselves in classrooms
Student David Kozak, 24, has been named as the killer by local police
The gunman began his attack at 3pm yesterday and by 4pm, police said he had been ‘eliminated’ after elite cops were seen storming the building.
The cops opened fire at Kozak while he was still trying to shoot more victims, Police President Martin Vondrášek said.
Extraordinary images show terrified students cowering on a ledge high up on a balcony in a bid to hide from the gunman after others were told to barricade themselves in classrooms.
It comes as the Czech police said today that 13 out of the 14 victims have been identified. The Interior ministry said there were two UAE citizens and one Dutch person among the injured.
Kozak murdered his father in his hometown of Hostoun before travelling the 13 miles into the Czech capital where he began randomly shooting people from the balcony of Charles University’s philosophy building.
The shooter legally owned several guns – police said he was heavily armed Thursday and was carrying a lot of ammunition – and that what he did was ‘well thought out, a horrible act,’ Vondrasek said.
He had a huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition with him, with the country’s Interior Minister saying that ‘if the police hadn’t entered the building in time, the perpetrator wouldn’t have been dead on the roof and there would have been a lot more victims.’
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In the lead up to his killing spree, Kozak is thought to have kept a diary in Russian on messaging app Telegram, writing in one chilling post: ‘I want to do a school shooting and possibly suicide.’
It emerged last night that police are investigating whether Kozak may have killed a father, 32, and his two-month-old daughter in Klanovice, near Prague. Hundreds of police combed the wooded area after the perpetrator disappeared, and authorities are currently probing whether the two killing sprees could be linked.
Today, Charles University raised black flags in the victims’ honour and cancelled all lectures and events following the shooting
Young people light candles at a makeshift memorial for the victims outside the Charles University in central Prague on Friday
Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Petr Fiala lays flowers outside Charles University building on Friday
‘I want to do school shooting and possibly suicide, Alina Afanaskina helped me too much,’ he allegedly wrote on December 10 of the Bryansk school shooter, who killed two students before taking her own life.
The chilling post in what the writer called their ‘diary’ about ‘life before the shooting’ went on: ‘I always wanted to kill, I thought I would become a maniac in the future.’
Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the ‘lone gunman… wasted many lives of mostly young people’.
‘There is no justification for this horrendous act,’ he added.
Though mass gun violence is unusual in the Czech Republic, the nation has been rocked by some instances in recent years.
A 63-year-old man shot seven men and a woman dead in 2015 before killing himself in a restaurant in the southeastern town of Uhersky Brod.
In 2019, a man killed six people in the waiting room of a hospital in the eastern city of Ostrava, with another woman dying days later. The man shot himself dead about three hours after the attack.
Though mass gun violence is unusual in the Czech Republic, the nation has been rocked by some instances in recent years.
A 63-year-old man shot seven men and a woman dead in 2015 before killing himself in a restaurant in the southeastern town of Uhersky Brod.
In 2019, a man killed six people in the waiting room of a hospital in the eastern city of Ostrava, with another woman dying days later. The man shot himself dead about three hours after the attack.
