A third school attack in less than a week shakes Poland

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A woman wounded three people inside an educational institution in Poland's capital, Warsaw, on Saturday, police say, in the third attack at a school in less than a week.

Bloodstains were visible Saturday afternoon on a patch of grass near the entrance to the private post-secondary school in the Praga district of Warsaw. The school was open on Saturday and the victims were submitting papers at the school office when they were attacked, police said.

The attack came after police on Saturday said they detained 76 people across Poland and checked nearly 50,000 schools nationwide as part of efforts to prevent further violence following two school attacks earlier in the week.

The suspect on Saturday used a “dangerous object” to attack a 17-year-old girl and also wounded two other people, aged 17 and 24, Jakub Filipiak, a spokesman for Warsaw police, told The Associated Press. None of the wounds were life-threatening. The suspect was in custody.

On Wednesday, a 19-year-old student at a vocational school in the Mazovian province in central Poland attacked fellow students, teachers and passersby with a sharp object, wounding nine people. He was arrested nearby. The following day, a 15-year-old killed a school custodian and wounded two others in a knife attack at his former school in the same province.

The assaults, both carried out by Polish nationals, shocked a country where school violence is a new phenomenon.

So far, the government said it had found no evidence that an internet challenge promoting school attacks was ongoing. There was no official confirmation that the attacks were linked.

The attacks “happen one after the other and there is geographic proximity, so you are left wondering if they are not connected,” Kacper Rekawek, senior researcher at the International Center for Counterterrorism in The Hague, told the AP.

“This is essentially a copycat scenario, something of a long trail of attackers going back to at least 2019, if not decades earlier,” he said, referring to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who shot and killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Rekawek said that one of the suspects in the latest attacks used the same imagery and aesthetics as Tarrant, which means the Polish incidents should be “placed within the confines of essentially terrorist behavior.”

Rumors that the attacks were coordinated and that there would be more on “bloody Friday” had been shared Thursday night in parents' online groups and by mainstream media. It led to 59 schools preemptively suspending classes on Friday across Poland, the majority in Mazovian province.

In other schools, principals sent messages announcing stepped-up security measures including extra staff at entrances and backpack checks.

“There will ?be no compromise here. The safety of the youth is the most important thing,” Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said.

Those detained on Friday include a 14-year-old boy from Warsaw who was found in possession of a knife with a concealed blade and 11 firecrackers, and a 16-year old who came to school with a butterfly knife in his backpack, police said. Others had posted online photos of knives, threatened their peers or threatened school attacks, police said.

Parents are now having to catch up fast on how to speak to their kids about school violence. Authorities say extra security measures at schools will continue and crisis training will be organized. The liberal government also promised to renew efforts to pass a bill blocking harmful online content.

“If that juvenile attacker had streamed the crime online today, we would have been unable to block that content because we have not been given that legal tool,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.

After allegedly killing the school custodian and wounding two adults in Thursday’s attack, the 15-year-old, who wore a camera to record his actions, was eventually overpowered by school principal Krzysztof Ochmanski. Ochmanski later told reporters there was a moment when the boy seemed to realize the enormity of his actions and said he did not want to do this anymore.

“Once I had established contact, he asked me for help,” Ochmanski recounted. “It got to the point where he wanted a hug.”