Teenager kills fellow student, teacher at Slovak school

A teenager killed a fellow student and a teacher in a knife attack at a secondary school in northeastern Slovakia and wounded a third woman.

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 AFP.

"An 18-year-old woman with moderate injuries was transported to hospital," she added.

Police said earlier on Facebook that a female teacher and two students were attacked.

The stabbings occurred in the town of Spisska Stara Ves near the border with Poland, around 280km northeast of the capital Bratislava.

The emergency service "sent several ambulance crews to the Spisska Stara Ves grammar school before 1pm (12pm Irish time) today", Capakova said.

Doctors had also treated a 51-year-old man and a 62-year-old woman at the site "because of acute stress reaction", according to Capakova.

Police identified the attacker as an 18-year-old student and asked the public for help as he managed to escape at first.

They also published a photo showing him with cropped blonde hair.

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.

'Real tragedy'

Slovak Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok condemned the crime, offering his condolences to the families of the victims and adding he was on the way to the crime scene.

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".

Serious violence is rare in Slovakia, a central European nation of 5.4 million.

The country was shocked last May when Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot in an assassination attempt.

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.