Kraków Toll Rises After Bodies Found

Authorities said a 25-year-old Polish citizen opened fire with an automatic weapon in the city’s main square at about 3pm, killing six people and wounding 16. Late on Saturday night, prime minister Donald Tusk said police searching the suspect’s home found two women and one man dead, most likely members of his family.

That brought the number of deaths linked by officials to the case to nine, though authorities had not publicly identified the three people found at the home. The distinction matters. Six people were killed in the public attack that sent people running through one of Poland’s best-known squares; the additional three deaths suggest a wider chain of violence that was still being assembled by investigators.

Polish police said four women and two men were killed in the square, including a British citizen. Three of the victims were Polish women, while the remaining two had not been identified, according to the Guardian’s account of police statements. A Polish government spokesperson said foreign nationals wounded were from Britain, Austria, Germany, Portugal and Russia. Two police officers were also injured, one of them seriously after being shot three times in an exchange of fire with the alleged attacker.

Interior minister Marcin Kierwiński said the suspect was influenced by far-right ideology and held “very radical” and “ultra-nationalistic” views. That is the government’s description of the suspect’s politics, not a public accounting of evidence. Defence minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz called the shooting an “act of terror” on the people of Kraków, language that captures the shock of it even before the investigation has finished sorting the full sequence.

One detail from the scene showed how quickly the violence spilled beyond a single point: Kraków’s municipal transport company said a tram driver reported that his vehicle was shot at from a man in a moving car near the main square, shattering the window to the driver’s cabin.

Kraków receives millions of visitors a year, many of them passing through the square where the shooting happened. By late Saturday, the facts were still moving, but the shape of the event was already grimly clear: six people killed in the heart of the city, and three more dead at the suspect’s home.