BANGKOK, Feb 11 (Reuters) – A gunman who fired shots at a school in Hat Yai district in southern Thailand on Wednesday has been detained and all the people who were held hostage have been freed, a police official told Reuters.
An 18-year-old man entered the Patongprathankiriwat School in Songkhla Province’s Hat Yai earlier on Wednesday with a gun, the provincial administration said on social media.
“The perpetrator has been captured,” Deputy Superintendent Wichian Soboon told Reuters, adding that two people – a student and a teacher – were wounded in the incident.
In a photograph shared by police, the suspect, barefoot and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, is seen held down on the ground by armed officers.
In a video shared by a witness, which could not immediately be verified by Reuters, armed police officers storm the three-storied school as the sound of gunfire rings out.
In another, also not immediately verifiable, students run down stairs at the school as police, some wearing helmets and black bullet-proof vests and carrying rifles, shouted: “Go home kids, it’s safe.”
Gun violence and ownership are not uncommon in Thailand, where a former police officer killed 36 people, including 22 children, in a gun-and-knife attack at a nursery in the country’s east in 2022.
(Reporting by Panarat Thepgumpanat, Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal, Editing by Andrew Heavens and Bernadette Baum)
