Pakistan condemns Austria school shooting, extends condolences to families of victims

Pakistan has condemned the shooting incident in the Austrian city of Graz earlier this week, where a gunman shot dead 10 people at his former high school before killing himself.

A former student killed ten people and himself at a secondary school in Graz on Tuesday in the worst school shooting in Austria’s modern history, sending shockwaves through the country which declared three days of national mourning.

In a statement, the Foreign Office said it was “deeply saddened by the tragic shooting at the secondary school in Graz that resulted in several casualties with many injured.”

The foreign office extended “deepest condolences to the families and loved ones and wish a swift and full recovery for the injured.”

“Pakistan stands with the people and government of Austria in this hour,” the statement added.

Introvert, online shooting games

Austrian police described the shooter as an introvert who had largely withdrawn from the outside world before he carefully planned the attack, Reuters reported.

Police found discarded plans for a bomb attack and a non-functional pipe bomb during a search of his home after the shooting in Graz, the capital of the state of Styria.

Police are still trying to establish a motive, but Michael Lohnegger, head of Styria’s criminal investigation office, said findings indicated the man was very introverted and that his great passion was online first-person shooting games.

“He led an extremely withdrawn life, he didn’t want to take part in activities in normal life outside in the real world, he preferred to withdraw into the virtual space,” Lohnegger told reporters.

Police said the rampage at the school lasted about seven minutes and that the man shot himself in the head in a toilet about 10 minutes after beginning the attack. A few minutes earlier, the man entered the school with a rucksack, and then went into a bathroom to prepare for his assault.

The shooter posted on social media from the building just before he shot dead 10 people and then killed himself this week, Austrian newspapers reported on Friday.

Newspapers Heute and Kronen Zeitung published details of a photo the young man apparently took inside a toilet cubicle with a timestamp minutes before police said the attack began in the school in Graz, a city in the southern state of Styria. The photo was published on X, they said.

Kronen Zeitung said the man had an interest in the 1999 US Columbine school massacre in Colorado carried out by two teenage shooters and that he apparently used a photo of one of the pair on his profile with his online gaming pseudonym.

Heute said the man had also published pictures of the pistol and the shotgun he would go on to use during the shooting on other social media.

Police have been scouring the perpetrator’s electronic devices, and said on Thursday that they had not discovered any video of the high school shooting on his mobile phone. The shooter was an introverted fan of online shooting games, criminal investigators said.