A former police officer armed with a gun and a knife stormed a nursery in northeast Thailand on October 6, shooting dead at least 30 people, including children, before killing himself and his family, police said.
\n\u201cThe attacker, armed with a shotgun, a pistol and a knife, opened fire on the childcare centre in Nong Bua Lam Phu Province at about 12.30 p.m. [0530 GMT] before fleeing the scene in a vehicle,\u201d the force said.
\n\u201cThe death toll from the shooting incident\u2026 is at least 30 people,\u201d Anucha Burapachaisri, a spokesman for the Thailand Prime Minister\u2019s office, said.
\nPolice colonel Jakkapat Vijitraithaya, from the Province where the attack happened, identified the gunman as Panya Khamrab, a police lieutenant colonel he said was dismissed from the force last year for drug use. Jakkapat said there were 23 children among the dead, aged two to three years old.
\nThe mass killing comes less than a month after a serving army officer shot dead two colleagues at a military training base in the capital Bangkok. While Thailand has high rates of gun ownership, mass shootings are extremely rare.
\nBut in the past year, there have been at least two other cases of shooting murders by serving soldiers, according to the Bangkok Post.
\nAnd in 2020, in one of the kingdom\u2019s deadliest incidents in recent years, a soldier gunned down 29 people in a 17-hour rampage and wounded scores more before he was shot dead by commandos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A former police officer armed with a gun and a knife stormed a nursery in northeast Thailand on October 6, shooting dead at least 30 people, including children, before killing himself and his family, police said. \u201cThe attacker, armed with a shotgun, a pistol and a knife, opened fire on the childcare centre in Nong […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1650,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-international","category-latest-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1651,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions\/1651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jammukashmirhighlights.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}