10 killed as Austria school shooting

Agency :

A shooter killed at least ten people and wounded many others in an attack at a secondary school in the southern Austrian city of Graz on Tuesday, the city’s mayor said.

Graz Mayor Elke Kahr was quoted by Austrian news agency APA as saying the attacker was also dead, and that many of the injured had been taken to hospital following the shooting, which she called a “terrible tragedy”.

Police gave no initial toll but said “several” people were dead and they were working on the assumption there was only one attacker.

APA video showed emergency workers loading a stretcher into an ambulance.

The reports did not specify how many of the dead were pupils. Ambulances were on the scene outside the school.

A local police spokesman said the area had been secured, the school had been evacuated and relatives of the victims and pupils were being cared for.
“There is no further danger for the population, but there are several dead,” he told Austrian television.

Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper cited unconfirmed reports as saying the suspect was a 22-year-old former student who carried two weapons – a pistol and a shotgun. Kronen Zeitung tabloid said a suspect had been found dead in a bathroom. Reuters could not immediately confirm this.

“It’s incomprehensible and unbearable. My sympathy and grief go out to the victims and their families. No one can imagine the suffering; as a mother of three children, it breaks my heart,” Austria’s Minister for European and International Affairs Beate Meinl-Reisinger wrote on X.