At least seven people died Friday after a student opened fire inside a school in Thailand and then killed himself, according to a national police official.
Panic swept through Debsirin Nonthaburi School, located on Bangkok’s northwestern outskirts, as students rushed from the campus, injured victims were placed into ambulances and distraught teachers embraced one another in tears.
Images shared by emergency responders showed one person on a stretcher near an ambulance, while another victim appeared to be receiving treatment from a medic at the scene.
An 18-year-old student told Reuters that, at first, the sounds did not register as gunfire. He thought they might have been firecrackers or someone striking an object.
“I didn’t think it was a gun at first,” he said. “There were many shots: bang bang bang. Then it went quiet. Then it started again.”
Lt. Col. Trirong Phophan, a spokesperson for Thailand’s National Police, told Reuters that the suspected attacker was included among the seven fatalities. He said 15 others were wounded.
SECOND SCHOOL SHOOTING
Education Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong said both students and teachers were among those reported killed. Police described the gunman as a student at the school.
The attack marks Thailand’s second school shooting this year, following a February incident in the country’s south in which a teacher was killed and a student was injured.
Emergency worker Kiatikhun Verapongpradith, 47, described arriving as the shooting was ongoing and his team treated students with injuries in the back, chest and arms.
They found a male teacher lying dead on an upper floor of the school, and in another room they found a female teacher with wounds in her chest and arm.
“We gave CPR for about 30 minutes and rushed her to the hospital as we could not get her heart rate up, but we tried our best,” he said.
In the 2025 academic year, the school had an enrollment of around 3,100 students and 147 teachers, according to district authorities.
Deputy Education Minister Akkharanan Kannakittinan said in a statement he was coordinating to provide assistance.
HISTORY OF SHOOTINGS
Gun ownership and gun violence are not uncommon in Thailand, which has seen a series of deadly shootings in the past six years, with children among the victims.
Thailand’s worst mass killing by a single perpetrator in its recent history took place in 2022, when a former policeman ran amok in a three-hour gun-and-knife attack in the northeast that killed 36 people including 22 children stabbed as they slept at a daycare center.
A gunman killed five people including security guards and a vendor at a Bangkok market in July 2025 before turning the gun on himself, while a teacher died in the southern city of Hat Yai in February this year when a shooter opened fire at a school where she worked.
In 2020, a soldier killed 29 people in a shooting rampage in Nakhon Ratchasima.
And in 2023, a 14-year-old used a modified handgun to kill two people and wound five others at a luxury Bangkok shopping center.
