(Prague) Minute of silence, flags at half-mast and masses throughout the country: the Czech Republic pays tribute on Saturday to the victims of the massacre which left 14 dead two days ago at the University of Prague, the worst attack of this type committed in this country.
A moment of silence was observed at noon Saturday (6 a.m. Eastern Time) and bells tolled in churches across the EU and NATO member country, two days after a 24-year-old student years old opened fire in the university before committing suicide.
“We are all trying to build heaven on earth, but the reality of life shows us that evil exists,” said Prague Archbishop Jan Graubner, celebrating a mass for the victims in St. Vitus Cathedral at Prague Castle. Prague. President Petr Pavel was present.
PHOTO MICHAL CIZEK, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
President Petr Pavel (center) attended the mass.
Fourteen people died: 13 at the time of the shooting which also left 25 injured, and one who succumbed to his injuries on Friday.
“It is difficult to find the words to express, on the one hand, the condemnation and, on the other hand, the pain and sorrow that our entire population feels, in these days leading up to Christmas,” said Prime Minister Petr Fiala.
Thousands of candles were lit in an improvised memorial in front of the Faculty of Arts and at the headquarters of Charles University in the historic center of Prague.
PHOTO EVA KORINKOVA, REUTERS
A man lights a candle near the Charles University buildings on December 23.
The identities of the victims, students and teachers, began to be published.
Among the victims were Finnish literature expert Jan Dlask and student Lucie Spindlerova.
A Dutch national and two from the United Arab Emirates are among the injured.
Interior Minister Vit Rakusan said no link could be established between the attack and “international terrorism” and that the attacker had acted on his own.
“Huge arsenal”
Since Thursday, police have arrested four people who threatened to repeat the attack, or approved it. Police surveillance will be organized around certain sites and school buildings at least until 1er January, indicated the Minister of the Interior.
The police chief, Martin Vondrasek, stressed that the assailant, unknown to the courts, had an “enormous arsenal of weapons and ammunition”.
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 student had also told a friend that he was considering suicide in Prague.
Police then 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 university’s main building.
Around 9 a.m., police were alerted to shots fired and sent an intervention unit to the scene. Twenty minutes later, the attacker was dead.
According to the shooter’s account on social networks, the latter indicated that he was inspired by a similar attack in Russia, explained Mr. Vondrasek.
A two-month-old victim
After a search of the shooter’s home, police established a link with the unsolved murder of a young man and his two-month-old daughter in a forest near Prague on December 15.
“A ballistic analysis proved that the weapon used in the forest was identical to the one found at the home of the university shooter,” police said on X.
Messages of condolences and sympathy have poured in from all over the world from Pope Francis, the American, French and Ukrainian presidents as well as from King Charles of Great Britain in particular.
“This could have happened to anyone. In fact, it could have been me,” student Antonin Volavka said Friday, lighting a candle at the makeshift memorial.
Czech Republic is on 12e safest country in the world, according to the 2023 Global Peace Index, and armed violence is rare there. But in 2015, a man shot seven men and a woman before killing himself at a southeastern restaurant, while another gunman killed seven people at an eastern hospital and then himself in 2019 .