Austrians hold vigil to mourn 10 victims of school shooting

Number of victims rises after injured female dies in hospital as police say shooter was former student.

Police in Austria were hunting for clues on Wednesday after a gunman opened fire at his former high school a day earlier, killing nine students and a teacher in a deadly spree that stunned the country.

Scores of shocked people gathered near the scene of the crime to observe a minute of silence 24 hours after the rampage in the city of Graz, mourning the victims of one of the worst school shootings in the country’s history.

Authorities confirmed they had searched the home of the 21-year-old Austrian national who attacked the Dreierschützengasse secondary school in the city, the capital of the southern Austrian province of Styria.

Graz police spokesman Sabri Yorgun told CNN that officers had discovered a non-functional makeshift bomb, a suicide note and a video message at the shooter’s home.

“We have carried out a search operation at the home address of the… suspect from the district of Graz… and have been able to establish that there was a suicide note both in digital form, via video message, and in handwritten form,” Yorgun told CNN Wednesday morning, adding that the items had been secured to assess the suspect’s motives.

Of the 10 people who died in the shooting, nine were students aged between 14 and 17, officials said. One of those was found dead outside the school when officers arrived on Tuesday morning. The bodies of the other students, as well as several other injured children, were found inside the building. All of those killed were Austrian citizens, apart from one who was a Polish national.

The tenth victim, who died on Tuesday night in hospital, was a female school teacher, Yorgun confirmed.

A further 11 people, aged between 15 and 26, were injured in the incident, including eight people with Austrian citizenship, two with Romanian citizenship and one with Iranian citizenship, police said Wednesday.

According to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, one of the victims was a French student. “Our thoughts and condolences go out to his family and friends,” Barrot said.

CNN understands that all those who were injured in Tuesday’s attack are now in a stable condition, including nine who remain in intensive care.

One victim with facial injuries requires a follow-up operation, while another has been left needing knee surgery.

Officers first responded to reports of “several” suspected gunshots at the school in the northwest of Graz at around 10 a.m. local time (4 a.m. ET) on Tuesday. Several vehicles and a police helicopter were then deployed to the site.

The suspect, who had previously attended the school but not graduated, used a rifle and a handgun to carry out the killing spree, before fatally shooting himself in a bathroom, authorities said at a Tuesday news conference.

Gun violence is rare in Austria, along with most central European countries. The country’s rate of firearm homicides was just 0.1 per 100,000 people in 2021, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, compared to 4.5 per 100,000 people in the United States.

But Austria’s gun ownership is higher than most European Union countries; there are 30 civilian firearms owned for every 100 citizens, according to the Small Arms Survey, a research institute based in Switzerland.

A small number of high-profile violent incidents have taken place there in recent years. Last October, the mayor of a northern Austrian town was shot dead, along with another victim.

In February, a 23-year-old man stabbed five passersby in southern Austria in what police said was a random attack.