A 16-year-old teenager wearing a Nazi symbol attacked two schools with gunfire on Friday in the state of Espirito Santo (southeastern Brazil), killing at least three people, including a teenager, and wounding 11. Three teachers and one unspecified student are in serious condition, authorities said.
The shooting occurred in Aracruz, a city of 100,000, about 600 kilometers northeast of Rio de Janeiro.
With his face covered and a swastika on his camouflage suit, the attacker broke into Scuola Primo Bitti, a public primary and secondary school he had left in June, according to investigators.
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After breaking down the back gate of the school, he entered the staff room and opened fire on several teachers, killing two and wounding nine others, authorities said.
A policeman stands guard as residents gather outside the police station where a teenager, perpetrator of two school shootings, is being held in Aracruz, Espirito Santo state, Brazil on November 25, 2022. (Credit: ANTONIO MOREIRA/ AFP)
CCTV footage released by the media shows the young man entering the school with a gun in his hand, as several people flee following him. We see him fire a few shots, without stopping.
He then went, not far from there, to the Praia de Coqueiral Education Center, a private school, where he killed a teenager and injured two people, before being arrested by the police.
The authorities arrested the attacker, said the governor of the state of Espirito Santo, Renato Casagrande who decreed three days of mourning.
“He was a pupil of the school (the first) until June, a minor of 16. His family then transferred him to another school. We know he was in psychiatric care,” the governor said at a news conference.
“He was trying to kill people. She shot the first one she saw,” she said.
According to him, several people among the injured are still in danger due to the severity of their injuries.
“We fervently pray for their recovery,” continued Mr. Casagrande.
Police officers stand at the entrance to the Praia de Coqueiral educational center, one of two schools where a shooting occurred, after an armed teenager opened fire, in Aracruz, Espirito Santo state, Brazil, November 25 2022. (KADIJA FERNANDES / AFP )
Civilian police commissioner Joao Francisco Filho told reporters the attacker “didn’t have a specific target” when he opened fire, and had been preparing the attack for “two years”.
The two handguns he used belong to his father, a police officer, and one was the latter’s service weapon, authorities said. They are investigating to find out if the young man had links to one or more extremist groups.
He was arrested in his home a few hours after the events and, with the collaboration of his parents, he surrendered without resistance.
Detectives were seen evacuating the bodies from coffins and placing them in trucks parked outside the school whose perimeter believed to be a crime scene had been cordoned off, according to an AFP photographer.
“Absurd Tragedy”
President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called the killing an “absurd tragedy” on Twitter. “I express my solidarity with the relatives of the victims and support the governor for an investigation,” said the leader of the left who will take office on January 1.
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva at the 12th Congress of the Brazilian Union of Workers (CUT) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, August 28, 2015. (AFP/Douglas Magno)
Lula has campaigned against the dramatic explosion in gun ownership and licensing under far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro since January 2019.
“Gun policy needs to be reviewed,” tweeted Senator Wellington Dias, a Lula ally.
“These last four years are the ones in which we have seen the highest number of attacks in schools, at least since the early 2000s,” Bruno Langeani, project manager of the Instituto Sou da Paz, told AFP. “We are convinced that the improved access to weapons in recent years under the Bolsonaro government has facilitated these types of attacks,” he added.
According to the Brazilian NGO Public Security Forum, there are an estimated 4.4 million guns in private possession in this country of 215 million.
However, school shootings remain relatively rare in Brazil, a huge but very violent country.
The deadliest occurred on April 7, 2011, when a 24-year-old man opened fire at his former school in the western suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, killing 12 students, before committing suicide.
More recently, on March 13, 2019, two former students shot and killed eight people and injured 11 others before committing suicide at a college in Suzano, São Paulo region.
