A teenager attacked a secondary school in northeastern Slovakia with a knife Thursday, killing a fellow student and a teacher and injuring a third woman.
Police said the 18-year-old was taken into custody immediately after the crime.
“Two women, aged 18 and 51, suffered fatal injuries,” Danka Capakova from Slovakia’s emergency service told AFP.
“An 18-year-old woman was taken to hospital with moderate injuries,” he said.
Police had earlier said on Facebook that a female teacher and two students were attacked.
The stabbing occurred in the town of Spišská Stara Ves, near the border with Poland, about 280 kilometers (175 miles) northeast of the capital Bratislava.
“The emergency service sent several ambulance crews to Spiška Stara Ves Grammar School before 13:00 (1200 GMT) today,” Capakova said.
Capakova said doctors also treated a 51-year-old man and a 62-year-old woman at the site “due to an acute stress reaction.”
Police identified the attacker as 18-year-old student “SS” and asked for help from the public as he managed to escape first.
He also published a photo in which he is seen with cropped blonde hair.
The Markiza private TV station said the student had moved to another school in the nearby town of Keczmarok after being expelled for threatening to attack fellow students.
‘The real tragedy’
Slovak Interior Minister Matás Sutaj Estok condemned the crime, expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, and said he was on his way to the crime scene.
Calling the attack a “real tragedy”, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini said: “No problem in the world can be solved with a knife or other weapon”.
The secondary schools’ student council said on Instagram that “hate and violence have no place in our society, let alone schools where young people should feel safe”.
In 2020, a teacher was stabbed to death and several others were injured at an elementary school in central Slovakia, the first violent attack at a school in the country.
Officers responding to the incident killed the attacker, a 22-year-old former student, as he tried to flee.
Elsewhere in Europe, in December 2024, a seven-year-old student was killed and several others were injured in an unprecedented knife attack at a school in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
In 2023, Serbia was rocked by a series of mass shootings, including a massacre at a school in the capital Belgrade that left 10 people dead.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
