Gunman kills at least 7 at Bangkok-area school in Thailand’s deadliest shooting since 2022

New Delhi: A ninth-grade student shot dead at least seven people, including three teachers, at a well-known secondary school on the outskirts of Bangkok on Friday morning before turning the gun on himself. Police said the toll, which also includes injuries to around 15 others, could still change as investigators piece together the full sequence of events.

The attack unfolded at the Debsirin Nonthaburi School in the Bang Kruai district of Nonthaburi province, a branch of one of Thailand’s oldest boys’ schools, founded in Bangkok in 1885. The institution counts diplomats, athletes and former prime ministers among its alumni, and had an enrolment of roughly 3,100 students and 147 teachers in the 2025 academic year.

According to Thai media citing police, the assailant first shot dead his grandparents at their home using his grandfather’s handgun, hours before he arrived at school. He is then reported to have stabbed a police officer and stolen the officer’s 9mm service pistol, which he used to carry out the attack on campus.

The interior ministry said it was investigating precisely how the teenager came to possess both weapons. A local police chief said the suspect had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment in December 2025 and was later discharged, though officials have not yet linked that history directly to Friday’s attack.

Witnesses described scenes of panic as gunfire echoed through the campus. One 18-year-old student told Reuters he initially mistook the shots for firecrackers or someone banging on a door, only for the sound to resume moments later. Another account described students hiding inside a classroom until police knocked and cleared a path for them to leave.

The prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, dispatched the deputy interior minister, Polapee Suwunchwee, to the site to assess the situation, while the Nonthaburi governor, Chettha Mosikarat, also visited. Traffic near the school ground to a near standstill as anxious parents converged to collect their children.

Photographs circulated by emergency responders showed ambulances operating at the scene, with the injured being stretchered out and treated by medics. Bullet casings were visible on the ground near where the suspect, photographed in a purple school uniform with a black cross-body bag, is understood to have been positioned.

Thailand’s recurring school shootings

Friday’s attack is the second on a Thai school this year alone. In February, a gunman opened fire at a school in Hat Yai, Songkhla province, killing the school director and injuring a student and a teacher.

Thailand has one of the highest rates of civilian gun ownership in Southeast Asia, with an estimated 10 million firearms in circulation – roughly one for every seven residents. Illegal possession of a firearm can carry a prison term of up to 10 years, yet enforcement has struggled to keep pace with the scale of ownership.

The country’s deadliest such attack remains the October 2022 massacre in Nong Bua Lamphu province, where a former police officer armed with a gun and knife killed 36 people, including 24 children at a nursery, before turning the weapon on himself. Authorities tightened licensing rules in its aftermath, including mandatory medical evaluations for those seeking to buy a firearm or renew a licence, though Friday’s shooting suggests those reforms have not closed the gap.

Reforms introduced since 2022 were meant to make guns harder to obtain, not easier to steal from the very officers meant to enforce them. Friday’s attack, if the account of a stolen service weapon holds up, points to a different vulnerability than the one policymakers have spent three years addressing.

For a region watching Bangkok’s response closely, the incident is likely to revive debate over whether legal ownership curbs alone can address a problem rooted as much in institutional gaps – armed officers, psychiatric follow-up, school security – as in the availability of weapons on the open market.