Flags at half-mast, choral performances cancelled, bells ringing, minutes of silence and altars with flowers and candles at the site of the massacre perpetrated yesterday at Charles University in Prague. The Czech Republic has experienced a day of national mourning for the 14 people shot dead by David Kozak, a 24-year-old master's student, quiet, brilliant, and allegedly mentally ill.. Hours before fulfilling the “dream of killing massively” confessed on social networks, he killed his father. The Police now consider him a suspect in the double murder that occurred a week ago in a forest near the capital, a case still to be solved..
The first identified fatality of the shooting, which also caused 25 injuries, including two Saudis and an identified Dutchman, was Lenka Hlávková, director of the Institute of Music Sciences of the Department of Philosophy of the University. She was a mother of two children. His colleagues have shared a photo of the victim and declared themselves “totally devastated” by a “senseless” murder.
The trail of blood left by Kozak began in his own home. Before traveling the 13 kilometers that separated the Czech capital from Hostoun, his hometown, he committed patricide. He was his third victim. The weapons found in the house, an arsenal of short and long weapons, link him to the deaths of a 32-year-old man and his two-month-old baby in the forest in Klanovice. More than 250 police were sent to search the area and a thermal imaging helicopter was used to search the wooded area, but no clues were found. They seemed like random murders.
Kozak, was a tuition student. This year he defended his bachelor's thesis on “Problems of Galician peasant antagonism and the Krakow uprising of 1846” and even received a prize from the Polish Institute in Prague. For his well-planned action, he armed himself to the teeth. “He had a lot of ammunition. If they had not acted quickly, there would have been many more victims,” the police maintain.
That was at least the shooter's intention. “I want to commit mass murder and possibly commit suicide,” Kozak wrote on Telegram. Some of the messages were in Russian. “Her inspirations were Ilyaz Galyaev (who in 2021 committed a shooting in a gymnasium in Kazan (Russia), killing nine people) and Alina Afanaskina (who recently committed a shooting in a school in Bryansk),” one of the messages reads. From Facebook. But Alina, 14, only killed two people before taking her own life, a balance too poor that Kozak wrote “I will fix.”
Kozak dressed in black, like a sniper, for the massacre. In the images he released, he is seen running through the building, but calmly, climbing the stairs to the upper floors and stationed on a balcony with his long-range rifle, a ZEV-30.. In one of the videos, one of the journalists who had traveled to the campus is heard shouting “shoot here, bastard” with the intention of distracting him.. Kozak stops for a moment, takes cover under a Ukrainian flag, walks to the edge of the balcony, rests his rifle on the railing and fires again.. At 4:00 p.m., after 60 long minutes of panic on campus, the police announced that the shooter had been eliminated. In reality he was shot dead.
The massacre at the Charles University of Prague, one of the oldest in Europe, leaves questions in the air and one of them is about the functioning of internet surveillance to prevent attacks. “When the monstrosity has subsided, it will be important to find out why the messages he wrote on Telegram announcing a massacre were not detected, and if they were, why nothing was done to prevent it.”. Excuses about lone wolves cannot be accepted today,” said journalist Jan Hrbáek.
For the president of the parliamentary security commission, Pavel áek, the question is different: “Should there be security in universities like there is in the United States?” Twenty-four hours after the tragedy, the security measures at Charles University in Prague were ostentatious. In classes that were not suspended, access was restricted to a maximum of 20 students.