The Austrian authorities on Thursday were attempting to piece together a full portrait of the apparently troubled young man who they say killed 10 people in the course of a shooting rampage at his former school this week, with scattered clues emerging in the course of their investigations.
Those details amplified concerns about how the man had been allowed to buy the guns he used to kill nine high school students and a teacher in the rampage, which has struck Austria to its core. The law requires prospective handgun owners to take a psychological test, which the gunman had passed.
A picture of the 21-year-old attacker, whose identity has not been revealed because of privacy laws in Austria, has been slowly emerging in the past two days from details provided by the authorities and from reports in local media.
Numerous news reports suggested that the assailant had been a loner with few friends, that he had been born in Austria and that he had been living with his Austrian-born mother in Kalsdorf, a small bedroom community just south of the Graz airport. The police have confirmed that they searched his mother’s house there on Tuesday.
The police said that the gunman had failed twice to graduate from the high school he attacked on Tuesday. When officers stormed his apartment on Tuesday afternoon, they found a nonfunctioning pipe bomb and plans for another attack, the police said, without providing further details about any other targets.
The Austrian Interior Ministry said on Wednesday that officials were investigating how a state-certified psychologist could have approved the man for a firearms permit.
The shooter went to the school in a working-class residential neighborhood in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city, after Vienna, on Tuesday morning after a three-day holiday weekend. He walked onto the school premises with two weapons: a handgun and a shotgun, the police said. He appeared to have gone unnoticed until he started randomly shooting students on the third floor of the building.
Despite the fact that school shootings are exceedingly rare in Europe, students were prepared for such an attack, Norbert Urabl, the deputy director of the school, said during an interview on public television on Wednesday evening.
Mr. Urabl said that students had asked their teachers about what to do during a school shooting when emergency plans were discussed during yearly evacuation exercises.
“Thankfully, many teachers and students reacted correctly.” he said. “They locked the doors, blocked those that were unlocked with tables and built barricades.”
Another teacher, Paul Nitsche, who was at the school during the shooting, said in an interview that he had briefly seen the gunman use his shotgun to try to open barricaded doors.
After the attack, the police were widely praised in Austria for responding so quickly and with such force.
Six minutes after a neighbor called to report shots, the first patrol car arrived. More cars arrived two minutes later, bringing the first of more than 50 highly trained COBRA officers — Austria’s version of SWAT teams. The armed officers ran immediately into the school.
The police said that the response was part of a strategy that officials drew up after studying shootings outside Austria. Those tactics include racing into an active shooting situation as soon as officers arrive at the scene.
“We cannot establish perimeter protection and wait for special forces to go in. We must equip all officers to be able to go in,” the national director of the COBRA police units, Bernhard Treibenreif, said in a television interview on Wednesday.
To make that possible, even regular police officers travel with bulletproof vests and ballistic helmets in their cars so they can run into a gunfight without having to wait for specialized units.
On Wednesday afternoon, mourners gathered in a central square in Graz, lighting candles and laying flowers, as they had done the night before.
The Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, also attended to pay his respects, to thank emergency workers and to promise that the facts around the tragedy would be fully uncovered.
“How on earth did it happen,” he said, “that a 21-year-old man made himself lord of life and death and indiscriminately killed children and young people?”
Jim Tankersley contributed reporting from Berlin.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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