A shooting at the Dreierschuetzengasse secondary school in Graz on Tuesday killed a teacher and nine students. The shooter, a 21-year-old former student, killed himself in a toilet after carrying out the attack, according to Austrian police.
“Around 9:40 am, we headed back to the classroom. In a third-floor hallway, we saw a boy who was over 170 centimeters tall and had two weapons with him – a pistol and an automatic weapon,” Shirin Hassan, from the Kurdish city of Afrin in northwest Syria, who studies at the school, told Rudaw.
She explained that, along with her classmates, they thought the shooter was not serious when he pointed the pistol at her and two of her friends.
“We thought he was joking, so all three of us laughed. Then he tried to shoot, but it didn’t fire, and we laughed again,” Hassan said, adding that they only realized the severity of the situation once the shooting broke out.
Detailing the attack, Hassan explained that students closed the doors to their classrooms, and after much shooting on the third floor, the shooter entered a classroom on the second floor and killed four students.
He later returned to the third floor, entered a classroom, killed “a number of students,” before barricading himself in the room, according to Hassan.
“We were 14 people in one room, we fell to the ground and put our hands over our heads,” she added.
Hassan described her narrow escape from death as a “miracle.”
On Wednesday, Austrian police said they found a “non-functional homemade bomb” during a raid of the suspect’s apartment.
A day prior, Chancellor Christian Stocker declared three days of national mourning over the shooting, calling the “act of unimaginable violence” a “dark day” for the country.
The incident represents was the deadliest mass shooting in Austria’s recent history.