Austrian police search for answers after mass shooting in school

Austrian authorities were searching on Wednesday for clues as to why a 21-year-old gunman shot dead 10 people in a rampage at his former high school before killing himself, in one of the worst outbreaks of violence in the country’s modern history.

Police said the man had acted alone, armed with a shotgun and a pistol. They are scouring his home and the internet to find out why he opened fire at the school in Austria’s second city of Graz on Tuesday, before shooting himself in a bathroom.

Austria came to a standstill at 10am on Wednesday to commemorate the dead with one minute’s silence. Churches rang funeral bells, including St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where about 900 public transport vehicles halted for a minute.

Public broadcaster ORF paused all radio and TV programmes for one minute, with TV showing images of candles and a message to say the country was mourning the victims.

The incident is hard to take in, said a religious studies teacher at the school, Paul Nitsche, who left his classroom before the gunman tried to enter, and briefly saw him trying to shoot the lock off another door.

“This is something I couldn’t even imagine before,” he told ORF. “That’s what the situation was like as I ran down the stairwell. I thought to myself: ‘This isn’t real.’”

Some Austrian media have said the young man, who has not been formally identified, apparently felt bullied, though police have not confirmed this. Authorities said the suspect had not completed his studies at the school.

Police said he had left a farewell note which did not reveal the motive for the attack and that a pipe bomb found at his home was not functional.

Ennio Resnik, a pupil at the school, said students and teachers needed time to come to terms with what had happened, and asked that they be left in peace for a few days.

“It’s surreal, you can’t describe or really understand it,” he said, speaking to reporters outside an events centre near the school where students were being offered counselling.

Some of the students gathered there cried, while others held each other.