The Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker has declared three days of national mourning, the Austrian flag flying half-mast with a national minute of mourning at 10 a.m. Wednesday following the shooting to death of nine citizens.
A 21year old former student armed two weapons which he owns on Tuesday shot and killed the nine students and wounded 12 others in a school at Graz, Austria before taking his own life. The Chancellor says that it was “a dark day in the history of our country.”
The incident happened at BORG Dreierschützengasse high school, about a kilometer (over half a mile) from Graz’s historic center, from where Police got a call at 10 a.m. and by 11.30 a.m evacuated the place and sent everyone to a safe meeting point.
The motive of the 21-year-old man who didn’t finish his studies, at the school Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said at a press conference in Graz, remains unknown as he took his own life.
President Alexander Van der Bellen said that “this horror cannot be captured in words.”
“These were young people who had their whole lives ahead of them. A teacher who accompanied them on their way,” he said.
“Schools are symbols for youth, hope and the future,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X. “It is hard to bear when schools become places of death and violence.”
Graz, Austria’s second-biggest city, is located in the southeast of the country and has about 300,000 inhabitants.
