•Police are seen outside a grammar school in the town of Spisska Stara Ves, eastern Slovakia, yesterday where a student killed at least two people and seriously wounded another in a knife attack
A teen killed a fellow student and a teacher in a knife attack at a secondary school in northeastern Slovakia yesterday and wounded another student.
The 18-year-old was detained shortly after the crime, police said.
“Two women aged 18 and 51 suffered fatal injuries,” Danka Capakova from Slovakia’s emergency service told our correspondent.
Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok said another student, also 18, was in hospital in a “serious but stable” condition, reports AFP.
He said the dead teacher was a deputy headmistress and declined to elaborate on the attacker’s motive.
The stabbings happened in the town of Spisska Stara Ves near the border with Poland, around 280 kilometres (175 miles) northeast of the capital Bratislava.
Slovak police chief Lubomir Solak said the police received a call at 1149 GMT and the first police car arrived three minutes after that.
The emergency service “sent several ambulance crews to the Spisska Stara Ves grammar school before 13:00 (1200 GMT) today”, said Capakova.
She added doctors had also treated a 51-year-old man and a 62-year-old woman at the site “because of acute stress reaction”.
Solak said several people suffered “very light injuries”, and that the attack occurred during classes when the school was full of teachers and students.
Police identified the attacker as an 18-year-old student named “S.S.” and asked the public for help as he escaped after the attack.
The attacker was detained “in a forest outside the territory of the town” at 1256 GMT, Solak said at a press conference.
Police also published a photo showing the attacker with cropped blond hair.
‘Real tragedy’
Sutaj Estok said the student had “excellent results” at school.
The Markiza private TV station said the student had moved to the school from another one in the nearby town of Kezmarok after being expelled for threatening to attack fellow students.
Calling the attack “a real tragedy”, Slovak President Peter Pellegrini said: “No problem in the world can be solved with a knife or another weapon”.
The Student Council of Secondary Schools said on Instagram that “hatred and violence have no place in our society, let alone schools where young people should feel safe”.
In 2020, a teacher was stabbed to death and several others injured in an elementary school in central Slovakia, the first violent attack in a school in the country.
Officers responding to the incident killed the assailant, a 22-year-old male former student, as he tried to escape.
Elsewhere in Europe, in December 2024, a seven-year-old pupil was killed and several others wounded in an unprecedented stabbing attack at a school in the Croatian capital Zagreb.
In 2023, Serbia was rocked by back-to-back mass shootings, including a massacre at a school in the capital in Belgrade in which 10 people were killed.
