A Thai teenager killed at least six people and himself at a school outside Bangkok on Friday after fatally shooting his grandparents, police said, in the Southeast Asian nation’s worst mass killing since 2022.
Students streamed out of the Debsirin Nonthaburi School, on the capital’s northwestern outskirts, as the wounded were loaded on to ambulances and teachers hugged each other and cried. In photos circulated by emergency workers, one person is seen lying down on a stretcher outside an ambulance, while another is attended to by a medic.
Police said the shooter, who was 14 years old, fired at least 26 bullets, and was found with 34 additional ammunition rounds. The gun had belonged to his grandfather, police said.
One 18-year-old student told Reuters he initially thought there were firecrackers going off or someone banging an object.
“I didn’t think it was a gun at first,” he said. “There were many shots: bang bang bang. Then it went quiet. Then it started again.”
Lieutenant General Trairong Phophan, a spokesman for the National Police, told Reuters the suspected shooter was among the seven people killed at the school. Fifteen people were injured, he added.
Within hours of a shooting rampage on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand’s Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul on Friday vowed to introduce a new firearms control law in Southeast Asia’s largest gun-owning nation.
Anutin, who previously tightened gun laws when he was interior minister, will now propose a law to restrict the carrying of firearms by the public.
“The new law will only allow government officials on duty to carry guns,” he told reporters on Friday, but did not provide any specifics for the envisaged legislation, including whether it will tighten gun ownership requirements.
