Deadly shooting in Slovak capital
Gunman turns weapon on himself after killing seven people in Bratislava.
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| The motive of the shooting in Bratislava was unclear [AFP] |
An armed man has killed seven people and wounded at least 14 others in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.
The assailant was believed to be a 50-year-old man, although his identity is unconfirmed. Police said he killed himself after the shooting.
“He was alone. He fired at everything that moved during his escape bid, the policemen surrounded him … they made it impossible for him to escape,” Jaroslav Spisiak, the police president, said.
Six of the dead were believed to be members of the same Roma family.
The motive of the shooting was unclear.
Child injured
Dominika Sulkova, from the country’s rescue service, said the shooting occured at around 10am (08:00 GMT) in the morning.
She said that a three-year-old child was among the injured, although his or her life was not under threat.
Emergency crews were on the scene and authorities were urging people to stay indoors.
Darius Haraksin, a reporter for TV JOJ in Bratislava, told Al Jazeera: “The first part of the incident was that the gunman went to his neighbour’s [flat] and killed five or six people in one flat.
“Later on he went outside the building and started shooting on everything he saw. The incident took 50 to 55 mins … there was big chaos.”
Area sealed off
Marta Vozbranukova, a teacher working at a kindergarten close to the scene, told the AFP news agency: “I saw an older man carrying an automatic gun walking towards a prefab house.
“After a while, an injured man of a Roma origin, whose family lives in the house, ran out and fell on the ground where the gunman shot him two or three more times.
“The gunman then started shooting on the street.”
Vozbranukova said that the there were no children in the kindergarten at the time.
The Devinska Nova Ves district of Bratislava, where the shooting took place, was sealed off by police roadblocks, TV-channel TA3 reported.
Slovakia experienced some shooting incidents involving criminal gangs in the 1990s, but has had no large-scale shootings in recent years.