Thousands of people in Austria have held a candlelight vigil for the victims of a school shooting in which 10 people were killed.
Three days of mourning have been declared in Austria, and a nationwide minute’s silence will be held on Wednesday at 10:00 local time in memory of the victims.
Flags on the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, where the President Alexander Van der Bellen has his office, will fly at half mast.
The school where the attack took place will remain closed until further notice.
Police said the 21-year-old suspect, a former student, took his own life in a school bathroom shortly after the gun attack in Graz on Tuesday – the deadliest in the country’s recent history.
The incident took place at Dreierschützengasse secondary school in the north-west of the city.
A further 12 people were injured, some seriously, and the gunman’s motive remained under investigation, officials said.
Six females and three males were killed in the attack, and a seventh female died later in hospital. Austria’s APA news agency has reported that seven of those killed were pupils.
At the vigil on Tuesday night, Graz residents said they wanted to turn the city’s main square into a sea of candles, and that is what they did.
In the whispering silence, thousands of mostly young people gathered over the course of the evening, alone or clutching the arms or shoulders of their friends. They lit candles, cried, or stood for a while in prayer or contemplation.
Then they slowly came forward to hand candles to volunteers who arranged them carefully on the steps of the fountain.
The Archbishop Johann fountain is known as the heart of the old town of Graz, in front of the city hall. On Tuesday night it became a symbol of the grief, and solidarity, of the people of Austria.
“When you hear about it, you have so much sympathy for the people, maybe you could have known someone,” Felix Platzer, a passerby at the vigil, told the Reuters news agency.
“This is an example of solidarity and you grieve together and together it is easier to cope,” he added.
Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker said Tuesday was a “dark day in [the] history of our country” and declared the shooting a “national tragedy”.
“A school is more than just a place to learn – it is a space for trust, for feeling comfortable and for having a future,” he told the conference, adding this safe place had been “violated”.
“In these difficult hours, being human is our strongest point,” he said.
The attack “strikes our country right at its heart”, Stocker said in the immediate aftermath.
“These were young people who had their whole lives ahead of them.”
The gunman, who has not yet been named, was a former Dreierschützengasse student who didn’t graduate from the school, Interior Minister Gerhard Karner told a news conference on Tuesday afternoon.
Karner added it was now the job of the criminal office to investigate.
Officers also confirmed the gunman was not known to police before the attack.
Current information suggests the shooter legally owned the two guns used in the attack and had a firearms licence, police added.
Local media outlets have reported the suspect used a pistol and a shotgun to carry out the shooting.
He was an Austrian man from the wider Graz region who acted alone, police said.
BBC
