The Faculty of Arts

JAN 01 2023 · 12:00

The Faculty of Arts of Charles University on Jan Palach Square, the site of the 21 December 2023 attack. Place: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Jan Palach Square Figures: David Kozák, 24, student and gunman (deceased) · fourteen named dead (twelve students, two staff) · twenty-five wounded At 14:59 on the last Thursday before the winter holidays, a 24-year-old philosophy student of the Faculty of Arts (FF UK) opens fire on the fourth floor of the building on Jan Palach Square. He kills twelve students and two staff and wounds twenty-five more before taking his own life on the roof. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Czech history. Police evacuate the building under live fire; a viral mobile-phone video shows students climbing onto the rooftop ledges of the neighboring buildings on Křižovnická to escape. The shooter, it later emerges, killed his father in their family home that morning and is suspected in two further killings (a father and infant daughter) in Klánovice forest eight days earlier.