Austria falls silent as questions remain about motive for deadly school shooting
The man's motive remained unclear.
Austria has declared three days of national mourning following what appears to be the deadliest attack in its post-Second World War history.
At 10am on Wednesday, marking the moment a day earlier when police were alerted to shots at the Borg Dreierschutzengasse high school, the country stopped for a minute of silence.
Hundreds of people lined the central square in Graz, Austria's second-biggest city.
Some laid more candles and flowers in front of the city hall, adding to a growing memorial to the victims.
The first candles were laid on Tuesday evening as a crowd gathered on the square, some people hugging each other as they tried to come to terms with the tragedy.
Hundreds of people joined Austrian officials at a service on Tuesday evening in the Graz cathedral.
Among those on the square Wednesday was Chiara Komlenic, a 28-year-old art history student who finished her exams at the school there.
'I always felt very protected there. The teachers were also very supportive,' she said.
'I made lifelong friendships there. It just hurts to see that young girls and boys will never come back, that they experienced the worst day of their lives where I had the best time of my life. I still know a few teachers, it just hurts a lot.'
In the capital, Vienna, the local transport authority had trams, subway trains and buses stop for a minute.
Police said they found a farewell letter and a non-functional pipe bomb when they searched the home of the assailant.
The 21-year-old Austrian man lived near Graz and was a former student at the school who had not completed his studies.
Police have said that he used two weapons, a shotgun and a handgun, which he appeared to have owned legally.
Police did not elaborate on investigators' findings in a brief post on social network X. But a senior official who acknowledged that the letter had been found on Tuesday night said it had not allowed them to draw conclusions.
'A farewell letter in analogue and digital form was found,' Franz Ruf, the public security director at Austria's Interior Ministry, told ORF public television.
'He says goodbye to his parents. But no motive can be inferred from the farewell letter, and that is a matter for further investigations.'
Asked whether the assailant had attacked victims randomly or targeted them specifically, Mr Ruf said that is also under investigation and he didn't want to speculate.
He said that wounded people were found on various levels of the school and, in one case, in front of the building.
By Wednesday morning, the authority that runs hospitals in Graz said that all patients were in stable condition.
Nine were still in intensive care units, with one needing a further operation on a facial wound and a second on a knee injury, while another two had been moved to regular wards.
'Graz is the second-largest city in Austria, but we still say that Graz is a village,' said Fabian Enzi, a university student among those on the main square of the city of about 300,000 people on Wednesday.
'Every time you are out you meet people you know. There is a high chance that with such an attack you know people which are affected,' the 22-year-old said.
'There are a lot of desperate faces.'
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The Guardian
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The Independent
an hour ago
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When it comes to reporting on mass killings, some in Europe take a different approach from Americans
When a 21-year-old former student opened fire inside his school in Austria's second-biggest city earlier this week, killing 10 people, it didn't take long for the Alpine country's press council to call on journalists to show restraint when reporting about the victims and their families. The appeal essentially reminded journalists covering the school shooting — the deadliest attack in Austria's post-war history -- to refrain from publishing names and other details about the victims. Police also didn't release any details about the victims other than their age, gender and nationality, in line with the country's strict privacy rules. 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'As opposed to the United States, where news are seen as a product and reporters are pushed to get all the details in order to raise the visibility of their news organization, journalism in northern Europe is seen as a service to society and to democracy that comes along with a lot of responsibility,' Paganini said. In the U.S., reporting on victims is a way to put a face on the tragedy In the United States, where news organizations have more experience dealing with mass shootings, reporting on victims is fairly standard and becomes an important vehicle to put a human face on the tragedy, said Josh Hoffner, director of U.S. news for The Associated Press. 'Many families are open to having those stories out there to celebrate the legacies of their loved ones and call attention to the failures that lead to shootings,' he said. Some news organizations make it a point to minimize the names of the alleged perpetrator of such crimes. There have been public campaigns to encourage journalists to focus on victims, survivors and heroes instead of the people who commit the crimes, said Amanda Crawford, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut who is writing a book on media coverage of mass shootings. Whenever there is a mass shooting, a team at CNN is assigned right away to learn as much about the victims as possible, said Matthew Hilk, senior vice president for national news at CNN. They are important voices that help viewers understand the gravity of the situation, he said. Often, survivors and their families also become active politically in lobbying for gun control legislation or other measures to curb these crimes. 'We always approach victims and survivors, and people connected to victims and survivors, with extreme sensitivity and certainly never push anyone to discuss anything they don't want to discuss,' Hilk said. Reporters who break the press code are shunned by their colleagues Of course, not all reporters in Austria and elsewhere in Europe abide by the voluntary press code to stay away from victims. Those who break the code — especially those from tabloid newspapers — are often shunned by media colleagues. There's even a German term to describe reporters who ruthlessly try to interview those affected by tragedy. It's called 'Witwenschütteln,' or 'shaking widows,' which in journalistic jargon means pressurizing the families of victims until they give up quotes. Germany and Sweden also expect ethical responsibility from journalists The call for responsible reporting in the face of tragedy and the plea to withhold information that may interest readers isn't unique to Austria. Publishing intimate information about victims is also considered unethical in neighboring Germany. When a German co-pilot intentionally crashed a plane flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf into the Alps ten years ago, killing all 150 people on board, the German Press Council received 430 complaints by readers and viewers who criticized the fact that the victims' and their families' rights to anonymity had been violated. The press council reprimanded several media outlets based on the complaints. That usually means that the reprimand must be published in the publication concerned. When 10 people were killed at an adult education center in Orebro in Sweden in February, in what is considered the Scandinavian country's worst mass shooting, the country's Professional Ethics Committee of the Union of Journalists, or YEN, specifically called out a reporter at Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet for interviewing a relative of the perpetrator after receiving several complaints about that report. The right to anonymity also applies to attackers The right to anonymity also applies to the perpetrator in Austria as well as Germany and Sweden. When asked at a press conference Thursday why police did not publish a picture or release the name of the 21-year-old Austrian perpetrator from Graz who committed suicide right after his shooting rampage, the head of the Styrian State Office of Criminal Investigation, Michael Lohnegger replied that 'we are not allowed to.' He added that 'if we publish photographs, it is for search purposes. There is no reason for a manhunt here. Therefore, as an investigating authority, we have no basis for publishing personal data or photographs." Lessons learned from the Nazi past In addition to the belief that the protection of those affected by a tragedy should be more important than the right to information, Paganini said there's also a historical reason for shying away from any abuse of journalistic powers. 'Especially Germans and Austrians still remember how irresponsibility and propaganda by the media during the Nazi times led to the brutalization of civil society,' she said.
