Teacher killed, child hurt in knife attack at Slovak school

A pupil attacked teachers and classmates with a sharp object on Tuesday morning at a primary and secondary school in Staškov, a village in the Čadca district of north-west Slovakia. A 61-year-old woman, a teacher, was pronounced dead at the scene, the Slovak news agency TASR reported, citing police.

Two other people were hurt. A child was airlifted in a critical state to a hospital in Martin, Slovak broadcaster TV JOJ said, while a 44-year-old woman with a chest wound was flown to a hospital in Žilina, according to Petra Klimešová of the Emergency Medical Service Operations Centre. She said two ambulances and two helicopters had been sent to respond.

Officers described the case as a violent crime under investigation and said the scene no longer posed an immediate danger to anyone. They identified the suspect only as an eighth-grade pupil, roughly equivalent to Year 9 in England, and did not say whether the teenager had been taken into custody.

Interior minister Matuš Sutaj Estočka and education minister Tomáš Drucker both went to Staškov after the attack, WELT reported. Prime Minister Robert Fico wrote online that he was following events closely and grieving for those affected, adding: "schools must be a safe place for our children, otherwise we will have no future." President Peter Pellegrini said he was troubled that pupils have again turned on teachers and classmates, pointing to hostility spread through social media and by some politicians as an influence on children's conduct at school.

Slovakia has faced fatal school violence twice before. A former pupil, then 18, killed a classmate and a teacher and wounded another pupil with a knife at a secondary school in Spišská Stará Ves in the north-east of the country in January last year. A teacher was stabbed to death and several people were hurt at a primary school in central Slovakia in 2020, an attack described at the time as the country's first of its kind.