He climbed onto the roof of the philosophy faculty of the Charles University in Prague and started shooting wildly, killing 14 people and wounding 25. Then he committed suicide or, perhaps, was eliminated by the officers who came running. David Kozak, 24 years old, Czech, student at the same university, had killed his father shortly before the massacre in the Kladno area, about thirty kilometers from the capital.
“There is no indication that this crime has any connection with international terrorism,” said Czech Interior Minister Vit Rakusan, trying in some way to reassure people shocked by what politicians and observers define as the most serious tragedy of the history of the Czech Republic.
And Czech President Petr Pavel also said he was “shocked”, posting his condolences on X. “It was a premeditated violent attack,” said police chief Martin Vondrasek while the delirious sentences of a sort of diary written by the killer in recent days on Telegram were already bouncing around the media.
«Let me introduce myself, my name is David and I want to do a school shooting and possibly commit suicide… I always wanted to kill, I thought I would become a maniac in the future» but «I realized that it was much more convenient to do a mass massacre instead of be a serial killer”, wrote Kozak on the social network, with light eyes and a clean face like a boy in the photo that stands out on all the sites.
A disturbing, psychiatric profile of a boy who, again on Telegram, said he was inspired by Alina Afanaskina, a 14-year-old Russian girl who shot a classmate at the beginning of December, injured five other people and then killed herself. shot. Another episode is also a source of inspiration: the school shooting in Kazan, Tatarstan, in May 2021 when nine people were killed, including seven students, and more than 20 injured.
Among the paranoid delusions with which the platforms are flooded daily, no one had noticed that boy who on December 17th still posted: “I hate the world and I want to leave as much pain as possible.”
The police are verifying the authenticity of the messages and have meanwhile reconstructed the sequence of events which show how Kozak had carefully planned the massacre. The carnage began in the morning with the discovery, at 12.40, of the father’s lifeless body in his house about thirty kilometers from Prague.
The police, on alert, evacuated a university building where the one who was still a suspect was supposed to go for a lesson at 2.00 pm. But Kozak, who had packed many weapons inside the university, mocked the officers by going to another building where he opened fire which caused the massacre. On the ground, 14 dead and 25 injured, a dozen of whom are in serious condition. At 3.20pm, the police chief said, the murderer’s body was found on the ledge of the building. It is not clear whether he committed suicide or was killed by the officers, who were working to name all the victims.
And in light of the massacre, police are working on the theory that the university shooter was also responsible for the deaths of two people last week in the Klanovicky forest near Prague.
The shock, in the city and in the country, was violent. At the University, terror. «We locked ourselves in the library and hid under the table. We all remained silent and wrote to our families, to the police”, one of the witnesses said on social media, explaining that via email the management of the Faculty of Philosophy told the students how to move and where to barricade themselves. What remains of those moments of panic is what will forever be the symbolic image of an unnecessarily announced massacre: a group of students huddled on a ledge outside a window of the university building. Still, in silence.