‘Praying to make it out alive’: How shooting terror unfolded in Prague
For many of the students at Prague’s Charles University, who were finishing their final days of term, the news that a gun rampage was under way on campus came in an email at just before 3pm.
“Stay in place, don’t go anywhere,” said the alert, rushed out to students and teachers. “If you are in offices, lock them and place furniture in front of the doors. Turn off the lights, the shooter is probably on the fourth floor of the building on Jan Palach Square.”
Prague’s medieval Old Town, with its biscuit-coloured buildings and astronomical clock, is a major attraction for tourists, who would have been relaxing at nearby Christmas markets as the tragedy unfolded.
Inside the arts faculty, where the shooter, 24-year-old David Kozak, studied Polish history, Jakob Weizman dashed across his classroom and piled chairs, desks and anything else he could find in front of the door.
He was lucky – right after locking and barricading it, someone on the other side, presumably the gunman, tried to open it.
“Praying to make it out alive,” the Danish-Colombian student posted on X, formerly Twitter, at 2.55pm local time as the attack was unfolding.
Another unnamed man inside the building told Blesk, a Czech newspaper: “Good luck to everyone in the building. We hear him shooting on the fourth floor.”
By that point, grainy photographs were circulating online of a man in black clothing wielding an assault rifle on the roof walkway of the faculty building.
A huge number of police and ambulances were dispatched to the scene as the Czech prime minister was informed of the crisis and urgently returned to Prague.
In another part of the faculty, eight terrified students clambered out of a window and lined up on a ledge, keeping their heads down in the hopes that Kozak would not spot them. The appalling scene was visible from the streets below, where someone took a photograph of the students clinging to the building for dear life.
At that point, Kozak was moving through the university and shooting at dozens, if not hundreds, of students, killing 14 people and seriously wounding nine others.
Amid the chaos there was a stampede, captured by mobile phone footage, as dozens of students fled the university.
“It was terribly scary – there were a lot of policemen everywhere, who were shouting at us with sub-machine guns, telling us to run outside,” Klara, a student who managed to escape the attack told Dnes, a Czech news site.
Across the River Vltava, which runs through Prague, a British newlywed couple enjoying drinks in the Slivovitz Museum were interrupted by a policeman who started yelling for everyone to take cover.
“A policeman came in and started shouting loudly in what I assume was Czech. I asked for it in English and he said there was an active shooter and to stay inside and stay down,” said Tom Leese, a 34-year-old video producer.
“The staff were very calm, turned all the lights off very quickly and urged us to stay calm, the restaurant was relatively quiet. The policeman left urgently and we stood in the corner of the restaurant.”
Joe Hyland, 18, was also on holiday and near the scene of the attack. “We heard gunshots and ran for cover in the metro after police shouted at everyone to run. It was very frightening,” said Mr Hyland, from Cornwall.
“All of a sudden, people started running. We didn’t know what was going on. We saw police going past us. They were shouting ‘run’.”
At the nearby Rudolfinum Gallery, director Petr Nedoma had a clear view towards Charles University and noticed that something terrible was happening on top of the arts building. “Upstairs on the walkway of the Faculty of Arts, I saw a man standing with a gun in his hand and shooting towards the Manes Bridge,” he said.
By 3.20pm local time, just 20 minutes after the onslaught began, police and ambulances had arrived on the scene and the attacker was dead. Police said he had murdered his father in their home village near Prague and then immediately travelled to Charles University, where he was a student of philosophy, to carry out the massacre.
It was not immediately clear how exactly the gunman was “eliminated”. According to local news reports, he was found dead after an exchange of gunfire with police.
Police officials later revealed that, at around 12.20pm they had received reports of a man wanting to take his own life, and that the man’s father had been found dead in a village 13 miles from Prague.
Katerina Vodvarkova, a TV journalist, was near the site of the attack and, in an interview, with the BBC said that “everyone is in shock.”
“Personally I never experienced anything like this in Prague. I watched students being evacuated and I had tears in my eyes that they had to witness this,” she said. “This is the busiest season for Prague, where we have our most famous Christmas market. It breaks my heart that visitors have to witness this.”
Petr Pavel, the Czech president, said he was deeply shocked by the attack, adding: “I would like to express my deep regret and sincere condolences to the families and relatives of the victims that the shooting claimed.
“I want to thank the citizens for respecting the instructions of the security forces and providing maximum cooperation.”
Bohuslav Svoboda, the mayor of Prague, lamented that his city was not safe from US-style mass shootings, saying: “The thing is, of course, a tragedy, it is a tragedy that occurs in the modern world.
“We know very well that for a number of years we have been hearing from the United States that there has been an excess of some shooter shooting in a school or on the street or somewhere.
“We have always thought that this is a matter that does not concern Europe and us, that this is a matter that is also a given in the United States due to the fact that everyone there is armed... now, unfortunately, it turns out that our world is also changing and we have the problem of the individual shooter whose reasons for what he does are not entirely clear.”
