The young man who the Austrian authorities say killed 10 people in a shooting rampage at his former school in the city of Graz this week was a loner obsessed with online shooting games, investigators said on Thursday.
“He lived an extremely reclusive life and was unwilling to participate in normal activities outside in the real world,” Michael Lohnegger, the officer who is overseeing the police response, said at a news briefing in Graz. Instead, he was devoted to first-person-shooter video games, Mr. Lohnegger said.
The details emerging about the 21-year-old suspect amplified concerns about how he had been allowed to buy the weapons — a handgun and a sawed-off shotgun — that he is accused of using to kill nine high school students and a teacher. Austrian law requires prospective handgun owners to take a psychological test, which he had passed.
A picture of the suspect, 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 local media reports. The police have said he was born and raised in Austria.
News reports have stated that the suspect had been living with his mother in Kalsdorf, a small bedroom community just south of the Graz airport. The police, who have largely refused to confirm any identifying details, have said that they searched his mother’s house there on Tuesday.
The police said that the man left the school after twice failing to pass the equivalent of the 10th grade. When officers stormed his apartment on Tuesday afternoon, they found a nonfunctioning pipe bomb and a detailed handwritten plan for the attack, the police added.
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 police say the man bought a Glock handgun at a store in Graz soon after he received the permit in May. Being over 18, he was able to buy the shotgun without a permit.
The gunman went to the school, in a working-class neighborhood in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city, on Tuesday morning after a three-day holiday weekend.
He walked onto the school premises at 9:43 a.m. with the guns and a significant amount of ammunition hidden in his backpack, the police said. He went into a bathroom on the third floor where he got ready by donning sports goggles, a headset and a belt with a hunting knife.
He took the stairs to the second floor and started shooting, apparently randomly, at children in a classroom, the police said. He then returned to the third floor and fired his way into a locked classroom, where he shot more students. While the killings seemed completely random, the suspect did know the teacher who was killed, the police said, adding that they were investigating whether she had been targeted on purpose.
The police said the whole rampage lasted seven minutes and ended with the gunman shooting himself in the head in a bathroom. They said they were unsure if the arrival of officers had precipitated the suicide but added that the shooter had lots of unspent munition.
Although school shootings are exceedingly rare in Europe, students were prepared for such an attack, Norbert Urabl, deputy director of the school, said during a TV interview on Wednesday.
Mr. Urabl said that students had asked their teachers about what to do during a shooting when emergency plans were discussed during annual evacuation exercises.
“Thankfully, many teachers and students reacted correctly,” he noted. “They locked the doors, blocked those that were unlocked with tables and built barricades.”
After the attack, the police were widely praised in Austria for responding quickly and with force.
Six minutes after a neighbor called to report shots, the first patrol car arrived. More pulled up two minutes later, bringing the first of more than 50 highly trained COBRA officers — Austria’s version of SWAT teams. The armed officers immediately ran into the school.
The police said that the response was part of a strategy that officials drew up after studying shootings abroad. Those tactics include racing into an active shooting situation as soon as officers arrive.
“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 units, Bernhard Treibenreif, said in a television interview on Wednesday.
To enable that, even regular police officers travel with bulletproof vests and ballistic helmets so they do not have 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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