A student shot several people at a high school north of Thailand‘s capital on Friday, killing three teachers and three students and wounding several others, police said.
The shooting happened at the Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Nonthaburi province northwest of Bangkok.
The gunman shot and killed his grandparents at their home Friday morning before opening fire at the school on Bangkok’s outskirts, police said. He fired 26 rounds and another 34 rounds of ammunition were found at the scene, police said in a statement.
Royal Thai Police spokesperson Trairong Piwpan said the motive for the attack was still being investigated. He said the gun was believed to have been taken from a member of the student’s family.
Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul offered his condolences and said he had ordered relevant officials to take care of the victims.
“It’s such a terrible incident. It should never have happened. How could this happen in our country?” Anutin told reporters at Bangkok’s Government House.
Shocked students, worried parents
Images from the scene about an hour after the shooting showed people standing outside the school comforting one another and police and first responders walking around inside the school.
Photos published by local media show the suspect wearing a purple school uniform and carrying a black cross-body bag, with several bullet casings visible on the ground.
Traffic near the Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Nonthaburi was nearly at a standstill, an AFP journalist saw, with local media reporting that parents were picking up their children following the incident.
Thailand has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the region, with around 10 million firearms estimated to be in circulation – one for every seven inhabitants.
Past promises of tightening gun laws have not prevented repeated shootings.
Read moreMore than 30 killed in shooting, knife attack at childcare centre in Thailand
Thai police shot and arrested a teenage shooter who opened fire at a school in the south of the country in February, leaving the school principal dead and two students injured.
The teen had used a police officer’s weapon in the shooting.
A local police chief said at the time that the suspect was hospitalised for psychiatric treatment in December and had been discharged.
The teen stabbed a police officer with a knife and stole his weapon – a 9mm pistol – just before the incident, and then used it to carry out the attack.
In 2022, an ex-policeman armed with a gun and a knife stormed into a nursery in the country’s north and murdered 24 children and 12 adults, one of Thailand’s deadliest massacres.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)
