A shooter opened fire at a high school in the Austrian city of Graz, authorities said Tuesday, killing nine people, including teenagers, in one of the worst rampages in the country’s history.
Austrian police confirmed the fatalities, raising the death toll from an earlier figure of eight. The country’s interior ministry told CNN that the victims included children between 14 and 18 years old. The perpetrator is also dead and the school has been secured, authorities added.
Several more people are seriously injured, police said.
Officers first responded to the reports of “several” suspected gunshots at the Bundesoberstufenrealgymnasium Dreierschützengasse school in the northwest of Graz at around 10 a.m. local time (4 a.m. ET).
Several vehicles and a police helicopter were deployed to the site. The school was evacuated and the area was secured, with no further danger expected, the police said on social media.
Austria’s Chancellor Christian Stocker expressed horror at the shooting, writing on X: “The rampage at a school in Graz is a national tragedy that has deeply shaken our entire country. This inconceivable act suddenly tore young people from the life they still had ahead of them.
“There are no words for the pain and grief,” he added.
Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, said: “It is difficult to bear when schools become places of death and violence.”
Gun violence is rare in Austria, along with most central European countries. The country’s rate of firearm homicides was just 0.1 per 100,000 people in 2021, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, compared to 4.5 per 100,000 people in the United States.
But Austria’s gun ownership is higher than most European Union countries; there are 30 civilian firearms owned for every 100 citizens, according to the Small Arms Survey, a research institute based in Switzerland.
A small number of high-profile violent incidents have taken place there in recent years. Last October, the mayor of a northern Austrian town was shot dead, along with another victim.
In February, a 23-year-old man stabbed five passersby in southern Austria in what police said was a random attack. (CNN)
