Latest / Best of: Features / A third school attack in less than a week shakes Poland
Transcript
- 0:05A third school attack in less than a week shakes Poland. This
- 0:12article is being read by an automated voice generated by Everlet. Warsaw,
- 0:18Poland, the APP. A woman wounded three people inside an educational institution
- 0:22in Poland's capital, Warsaw, on Saturday, police say, in the third attack
- 0:26at a school in less than a week. Blood stains were visible
- 0:30Saturday afternoon on a patch of grass near the entrance to The
- 0:33private post secondary school in they Praga district of Warsaw. The school
- 0:38was open on Saturday, and the victims were submitting papers at the
- 0:41school office when they were attacked, police said. The
- 0:45attack came after police on Saturday said they detained seventy six people
- 0:49across Poland and checked nearly fifty thousand schools nationwide as part of
- 0:54efforts to prevent further violence following two school attacks earlier in the
- 0:58week. The suspect on Saturday used a dangerous object to attack a
- 1:02seventeen year old girl and also wounded two other people. Aged seventeen
- 1:06and twenty four, Jakub Filipiak, a spokesman for Warsaw Police, told The
- 1:11Associated Press None of the wounds were life threatening. The suspect was
- 1:15in custody. On Wednesday, a nineteen year old student at a vocational
- 1:19school in the Mazovian province in central Poland attacked fellow students, teachers
- 1:24and passers by with a sharp object, wounding nine people. He was
- 1:28arrested nearby. The following day a fifteen year old killed a school
- 1:32custodian and wounded two others in a knife attack at his former
- 1:35school in the same province. The assaults, both carried out by Polish
- 1:40nationals, shocked a country where school violence is a new phenomenon. Police
- 1:45say no evidence the attacks were coordinated. So far the government said
- 1:50it had found no evidence that an Internet challenge promoting school attacks
- 1:54was ongoing. There was no official confirmation that the attacks were linked.
- 1:59The attacks happen one after the other, and there is geographic proximity,
- 2:04so you are left wondering if they are not connected. Kappa Rekawek,
- 2:07senior researcher at the International Center for Counterterrorism in the Hague, told
- 2:12the AP. This is essentially a copycat scenario, something of a long
- 2:16trail of attackers going back to at least twenty nineteen, if not
- 2:20decades earlier, he said, referring to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who
- 2:25shot and killed fifty one Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New
- 2:29Zealand, in twenty nineteen. Rakowic said that one of the suspects in
- 2:33the latest attacks used the same imagery and aesthetics as Tarrant, which
- 2:38means the Polish incident should be placed within the confines of essentially
- 2:42terrorist behavior. Rumors that The attacks were coordinated and that there would
- 2:47be more on Bloody Friday had been shared Thursday night in parents
- 2:50online groups and by mainstream media. It led to fifty nine schools
- 2:55preemptively suspending classes on Friday across Poland, the majority in Mazovian province.
- 3:01In other schools, principals sent sipages announcing stepped up security measures including
- 3:06extra staff at entrances and backpack, checks. There will be no compromise
- 3:11here. The safety of the youth is the most important thing, Interior
- 3:15Minister Martin Kiervinsky said. Knives confiscated in schools as violence grows. Those
- 3:21detained on Friday include a fourteen year old boy from Warsaw, who
- 3:25was found in possession of a knife with a concealed blade and
- 3:28eleven firecrackers, and a sixteen year old who came to school with
- 3:32a butterfly knife in his backpack, police said. Others had posted online
- 3:36photos of knives, threatened their peers, or threatened school attacks, police said.
- 3:42Parents are now having to catch up fast on how to speak
- 3:45to their kids about school violence. Authorities say extra security measures at
- 3:49schools will continue and crisis training will be organized. The Liberal government
- 3:54also promised to renew efforts to pass a bill blocking harmful online
- 3:58content. If that juvenile attacker had streamed the crime online today, we
- 4:03would have been unable to block that content because we have not
- 4:06been given that legal tool, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said. After allegedly
- 4:11killing the school custodian and wounding two adults in Thursday's attack, the
- 4:16fifteen year old, who wore a camera to record his actions, was
- 4:19eventually overpowered by school principal Christoph Ochmainsky. Ochmainsky later told reporters
- 4:25there was a moment when the boy seemed to realize the enormity
- 4:28of his actions, and said he did not want to do this
- 4:31any more. Once I had established contact he asked me for help,
- 4:35Ochmainsky recounted. It got to the point where he wanted a hug.