Buildings at the Faculty of Arts of Ostrava University were closed today after an anonymous threat of a shooting attack. Adam Soustruznik from the university told CTK the perpetrator of the threat has been arrested.
No one was injured, he added.
Police spokeswoman Sonia Stetinska did not comment on the information, adding that police would do so later. She said, however, that there was no acute danger to the public at that moment.
Soustruznik, head of the university’s centre for marketing, communication and popularisation, said the university had learnt of the threat from police. “For precautionary reasons, we decided to evacuate and close the buildings of the University of Ostrava. Before 1pm, we received information from the Czech police that the possible perpetrator had been detained,” Soustruznik said.
According to CTK, police cooperated with the school in closing the buildings. There were police officers with guns at the Faculty of Arts, eyewitnesses said.
Dozens of faculty employees were evacuated, but there were no students in the university buildings as the new semester of classes has not yet begun, Soustruznik said.
Last December, 14 people died and another 25 were injured in a shooting at the main building of the Faculty of Arts of Prague’s Charles University, the most deadly incident of its kind in the history of the Czech Republic.
The perpetrator was a 24-year-old faculty student, who also died at the scene. He killed his father before the faculty shooting, and was also responsible for the murder of a man and his two-month-old daughter in a forest on the outskirts of Prague on 15 December.
Schools in the Czech Republic have been receiving threatening emails since last Tuesday. Their author(s) claimed that schools were booby-trapped, possibly with bombs. Last week, a working group of representatives of the education and interior ministries, the police and the human rights commissioner, was set up to address these problems
Schools in Slovakia have faced similar threats.
