Seven dead in school shooting in Thailand

A Thai teenager killed at least six people and then himself at a school near Bangkok after killing his grandparents, police said, in the Southeast Asian country's worst mass shooting since 2022.

Students poured out of Debsirin School in Nonthaburi, on the northwestern outskirts of the capital, as the injured were loaded into ambulances, with teachers hugging and crying. Photos released by emergency services showed one person on a stretcher in front of an ambulance, while another was treated by a medic.

Police said the gunman, who was 14 years old, fired at least 26 shots and was found with 34 rounds of ammunition. The gun belonged to his grandfather, police said.

An 18-year-old student told Reuters that he initially thought someone was throwing firecrackers or hitting someone with an object.

"At first I didn't think it was a gun," he said. "There were lots of shots: bang, bang, bang. Then there was silence. Then it started again."

Lieutenant General Trairong Phophan, a spokesman for the National Police, told Reuters that the suspected attacker was among the seven people killed at the school. He added that 15 people were injured.

Second school shooting

Education Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong told Reuters that both teachers and students were among the dead. Police said the attacker was a student at the school.

This is the second school shooting in Thailand this year, after a teacher was killed and a student was injured in the south of the country in February.

Emergency worker Kiatikhun Verapongpradith said he arrived at the scene while the shooting was still ongoing and his team treated students with injuries to their backs, chests and arms. They found a dead teacher on one of the upper floors of the school, while in another room they found a female teacher with wounds to her chest and arm.

He said he was called to assist the teenage shooter after the final shot was fired.

"We immediately ran upstairs and saw that the attacker had shot himself in the right side of the head and fallen. When we arrived, we checked his pulse, he still had it, so we started CPR."

The suspect was then transported to the hospital, he said.

In the 2025 school year, the school had about 3.100 students and 147 teachers, according to local government data.

"It's terrible that something like this happened," Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told reporters. "I'm sad for those who lost their lives and I'm sad that something like this happened in our country."

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, including among the victims children, Reuters writes.

The worst mass murder by a single attacker in Thailand's recent history occurred in 2022, when a former police officer killed 36 people, including 22 children who were stabbed while sleeping in a kindergarten, during a three-hour gun and knife attack in the country's northeast.

A gunman killed five people, including security guards and a vendor, at a market in Bangkok in July 2025 before killing himself. In February this year, a teacher was killed when a gunman opened fire at the school where she worked in the southern city of Hat Yai.

In 2020, a soldier killed 29 people in a mass shooting in Nakhon Ratchasima. Three years later, a 14-year-old used a converted gun to kill two people and injure five others at a luxury shopping mall in Bangkok.

After the 2023 shooting, Anutin, then serving as interior minister, ordered a series of gun control measures, including a temporary ban on issuing new licenses, import restrictions, and a ban on access to shooting ranges for people under 20.

Longer-term measures included mandatory medical examinations to assess the mental health and psychological state of gun owners, as well as the introduction of a limited validity period for certain gun licenses.

According to a 2017 estimate by the Small Arms Survey, there were approximately 10,3 million firearms in civilian possession in Thailand, or approximately 15 for every 100 inhabitants, by far the highest rate in Southeast Asia.