Czech police seek motive for gunman's university slaughter

Czech authorities are seeking a motive for a student's gun attack that killed 13 people at a Prague university, where tearful mourners have left a sea of candles to grieve for the victims. 

The gunfire on Thursday at the Charles University's Faculty of Arts sparked frantic scenes of students running from the attack that was the Czech Republic's worst shooting in decades. 

Twenty-four-year-old student David Kozak killed 13 people after opening fire at the university, Czech authorities said on Friday, revising the toll from 14 victims. A further 25 people were wounded.

People lay tributes at a memorial during a vigil following a shooting at one of Charles University's buildings in Prague. /David W Cerny/Reuters

"We know all 14 dead and their identity. It's 13 victims of the mad gunman and the gunman himself," Interior Minister Vit Rakusan told the public Czech TV, while police said the gunman had died by suicide in Thursday's attack.

A makeshift memorial of hundreds of candles flickered outside the university on Friday as police pursued the investigation at the campus in Prague's historic center.

Three of the wounded were foreigners. The Dutch foreign ministry said earlier one of them was a Dutch national.

All the victims were killed inside the building, and at least some were the gunman's fellow students.

Rakusan had said earlier that there was no link between the shooting and "international terrorism" and that the student acted on his own. 

Although police said there was no longer any imminent threat, they were still guarding selected sites including schools on Friday as a preventive measure and "a signal we are here."

The government has declared a national day of mourning on Saturday, with flags on official buildings to be flown at half-staff and people asked to observe a minute's silence at noon.

The gunman, previously unknown to the police, had a "huge arsenal of weapons and ammunition," Police Chief Martin Vondrasek said.

Police had started a search for the student even before the mass shooting, after his father was found dead in the village of Hostoun, west of Prague.

The search started at a Faculty of Arts building where the gunman was expected to show up for a lecture, but he went instead to the faculty's main building nearby.

Police learned about the shooting at around 1400 GMT and sent a rapid response unit to the scene. Twenty minutes later the gunman was dead.

People watch from a roof following a shooting at one of the buildings of Charles University. Ivo Havranek/via Reuters

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Possible inspiration

Citing an inquiry into the student's social media activities, Vondrasek said the gunman was inspired by a "similar case that happened in Russia," without providing further details.

Vondrasek said police believed the same gunman had also killed a young man and his two-month-old daughter in a pram during a walk in a forest on the eastern outskirts of Prague on December 15.

The investigation into those murders, which had shocked Prague, had stalled until evidence found in Hostoun linked the gunman with the crime.

The shooting at Charles University, which sits near major tourist sites like the 14th-century Charles Bridge, is the deadliest since the Czech Republic emerged as an independent state in 1993.