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A former police officer shot dead at least 35 people, most of them children, when he stormed a nursery in eastern Thailand on Thursday in one of the kingdom’s deadliest mass killings.
After the attack, the gunman Panya Khamrab went home and killed his wife and child before taking his own life, the police said.
Armed with a shotgun, pistol and knife, Khamrab opened fire on the child care center in the town of Uthai Sawan in Nong Bua Lam Phu province, about 500 kilometers northeast of the capital Bangkok, at about 1:30 p.m. (Manila time).
The gunman killed 35 people, including 23 children, and wounded 12 others, Police Col. Jakkapat Vijitraithaya told Agence France-Presse (AFP) from the province where the attack happened.
The 34-year-old former police lieutenant colonel had been dismissed from the force last year for drug use, Vijitraithaya added.
Eyewitness Paweena Purichan, 31, was riding her motorcycle to her shop when she encountered the fleeing Khamrab driving erratically.
“He intended to crash into others on the road,” she told AFP.
“The attacker rammed a motorbike and two people were injured. I sped off to get away from him,” Paweena said, adding: “There was blood everywhere.”The attacker was well known in the area as a drug addict, according to the witness.
Video footage after the incident showed distraught parents weeping in a shelter outside the nursery, a yellow-walled single-story building set in a garden.
About 30 children were at the center when the gunman arrived, fewer than usual, as heavy rain had kept many people away, district official Jidapa Boonsom, who was working in a nearby office at the time, told Reuters.
