Five killed and more than a dozen injured in Kraków shooting

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Kraków shooting latest updates: five killed and more than a dozen injured, police say theguardian.com

Five people have been killed and more than a dozen injured in a shooting in central Kraków, Polish police have said. The perpetrator was shot by police officers and taken to hospital. Officers began receiving reports at around 3 pm local time that a car from which shots were being fired at random people had entered the square.

The account so far rests almost entirely on a police statement posted on X and a spokesperson briefing Reuters. According to that statement, the attacker fired at random from a car before officers shot the perpetrator. Random victims remove the usual opening explanation — a grievance aimed at specific people — and with it the fastest route to a motive. More than a dozen wounded also means the firing went on long enough to reach that many people before officers stopped it.

Poland tightly licenses firearm ownership, and events of this kind are rare. The rarity is visible in the response: the attack ended within the police intervention, not after a manhunt through the city centre. It also means the days ahead proceed without domestic precedent — whether the country ever learns why depends in part on whether the perpetrator survives the wounds inflicted by the officers who ended the attack, and in part on what the vehicle, the weapons and the square yield to investigators.

By early evening, a few lines on X remained the fullest public account of how five people came to be dead in central Kraków.