Krakow gunman kills 6 in market-square attack, police say

Polish police said a gunman killed at least six people and injured 16 in Krakow’s main market square on Saturday, according to a Nov. 7 Deutsche Welle report.

The shooting hit a tourist site in Poland’s second-largest city, home to more than 800,000 people, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the attack as terrorism, DW reported.

Police said the suspect was a 25-year-old Polish man who allegedly acted alone. Authorities said he was wounded in a firefight with officers and taken to hospital.

“Until now in Poland we haven't had such drastic cases of terrorism,” Tusk told reporters in Krakow. “That's what we have to call this cruel attack on people's lives here in Krakow,” he added.

Police said on X that the attack began at about 3 p.m. local time, or 1400 GMT, after the man drove into the square and opened fire from the vehicle. Officers were among the wounded, police said.

Authorities later said the suspect drove to several locations within the square and fired at each place with an automatic weapon, DW reported. Krakow police spokesperson Katarzyna Cislo said the man wore military-style clothing and a bulletproof vest and used a long gun.

Polish police chief Marek Boron said the dead included four women and two men. He identified three of the victims as Polish women and one as a British national, and said two victims had not yet been identified.

Krakow police earlier said five of the 16 wounded were foreign nationals. An Interior Ministry spokesperson said they came from Austria, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Britain.

Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said the suspect, whom he did not name, was “fascinated by far-right ideologies” and held “ultranationalistic” and “very radical” views. Those statements describe officials’ assessment of the suspect; authorities did not release a full account of motive in the DW report.

Tusk said later Saturday that police found the bodies of two women and a man at the suspected shooter’s home in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, about 150 kilometers northeast of Krakow. He said there was “much to suggest” they were members of the suspect’s immediate family; Atlas360 reported on Nov. 8 that police later linked those three bodies to the suspect’s parents and sister.

Tusk said Poland would observe two days of mourning. EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas said the attack would be felt beyond Poland and that “Poland does not stand alone,” while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote that Germany stood with Poland.

Source: Deutsche Welle report, Nov. 7; Atlas360 background reporting, Nov. 8