Kraków Main Square attack, Digi Mart USA News (Kraków, Poland): The attacker is dead, and both police officers who stopped the gunman in Kraków have woken from comas, according to a Wirtualna Polska report published Monday morning. Prosecutors say there is no doubt that the same 24-year-old man earlier killed his parents and sister in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski.
The regional voivode has named the victims from Main Square.
On Saturday at about 3 p.m., a man wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest drove a black Subaru onto Main Square from Sławkowska Street and began firing a long gun at passersby. He then fled through Grodzka and Stradomska streets, firing at a Tram Line 1 vehicle along the way.
At the intersection of Stradomska and Dietla streets, he collided with another car and opened fire on police officers. He was shot and subdued.
Prosecutors said on Sunday where the victims died. Three people were killed at the intersection of Sławkowska and Szczepańska streets.
One died inside a Zara store, one at its entrance, and one near St. Mary’s Basilica, where horse-drawn carriages wait.
Inspections at those locations have concluded, and Main Square has reopened.
Police said on Sunday that the pursuit of the attacker lasted 123 seconds.
Robert, a witness who had come to Kraków with his wife for the weekend, said the shooting initially sounded like firecrackers. He said injured carriage drivers at first did not understand what had happened, and that a woman had a shot finger while a man said he could not feel his arm.
Robert said relief came only when ambulances, fire crews, police and a helicopter arrived.
Another witness, Sylwia, said she saw the chase and fled on all fours, describing a feeling of having “death in her eyes.”
Daniel Prokopowicz, spokesman for the District Prosecutor’s Office in Kielce, said a report that the attacker had killed someone in Waśniów last year is not true, according to prosecutors and police.
In Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a neighbor, Zbigniew Szostek, said he saw the 24-year-old the morning before the attack leaving for work in the family’s Subaru. He described the young man as quiet and said he had never seen him in uniform.
Szostek said he saw the father’s firearm kept in a large safe and did not consider the family’s gun ownership worrying. Neighbors described the parents as a respectable, non-conflictual family; the father ran an electrical company, the mother worked at a Biedronka store, and the sister studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków.
Police said in a Sunday statement that officers acted despite a real threat, without calculating the risk, to stop the attacker and protect others. Officer Jakub Kulik was hit by three bullets.
He has also served for about 10 years in the Leszczyny volunteer fire brigade in Bielsko-Biała, colleagues said.
Two surgeons from the University Hospital in Kraków, Michał Pędziwiatr and Mateusz Wierdak, were eating lunch with their families at a restaurant near the Stradomska and Dietla intersection when the shooting stopped. They ran to the wounded.
Wierdak, without gloves or equipment, stopped bleeding from the most seriously injured officer, while Pędziwiatr assessed the others and called the John Paul II Hospital, where cardiac and thoracic surgeons work. Doctors asked that the officer be transported there.
Pędziwiatr also disputed claims that police were absent, saying more than a dozen patrol cars and many officers were at the scene.
Police are asking witnesses and anyone with footage of the attack to contact the nearest police unit. The city operates a 24-hour helpline at 12 421 92 82.
