Teacher killed in Thailand school shooting, student gunman dead

At least one teacher was killed, and several others were wounded after a student opened fire at a secondary school in Thailand on Friday, August 7, authorities said.

Preliminary information indicated that two people were killed and 15 others injured, including one person in critical condition, according to a major rescue foundation.

“Officers are urgently evacuating students from the area,” the foundation said in a statement, cited by CNN.

The shooting occurred at Debsirin Nonthaburi School, a large secondary school with around 3,000 students, located along a busy highway in Bang Kruai district, Nonthaburi province, just north of Bangkok.

A senior provincial police official said the suspected gunman, identified as a student at the school, had taken his own life.

Authorities said the “situation is now under control.”

Among those injured were one teacher and three students, according to officials.

Video footage from the scene appeared to show students running out of the school building as staff members assisted in evacuating them. Emergency responders arrived with stretchers and transported the wounded, with images from the scene showing victims receiving medical attention outside ambulances.

Gun ownership in Thailand is relatively high compared with other countries in Southeast Asia. According to 2017 data from the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey, there were more than 10.3 million civilian-owned firearms in the country, equivalent to about 15 guns per 100 people.

Thailand has one of the highest rates of gun-related killings in Southeast Asia, ranking second after the Philippines, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

The incident follows previous cases of gun violence in educational settings. In February, a teacher was killed and a student wounded in a school shooting in Hat Yai district in southern Thailand. In 2022, 36 people, including 24 children, were killed in a mass shooting at a childcare centre in the country’s northeast, one of the deadliest incidents of its kind.

By Tamilla Hasanova