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Officials were investigating how an apparently troubled man had passed the psychological test required to buy firearms.
June 12, 2025, 5:49 a.m. ET
The Austrian authorities on Thursday were attempting to piece together a full portrait of the apparently troubled young man who they say killed 10 people in the course of a shooting rampage at his former school this week, with scattered clues emerging in the course of their investigations.
Those details amplified concerns about how the man had been allowed to buy the guns he used to kill nine high school students and a teacher in the rampage, which has struck Austria to its core. The law requires prospective handgun owners to take a psychological test, which the gunman had passed.
A picture of the 21-year-old attacker, whose identity has not been revealed because of privacy laws in Austria, has been slowly emerging in the past two days from details provided by the authorities and from reports in local media.
Numerous news reports suggested that the assailant had been a loner with few friends, that he had been born in Austria and that he had been living with his Austrian-born mother in Kalsdorf, a small bedroom community just south of the Graz airport. The police have confirmed that they searched his mother’s house there on Tuesday.
The police said that the gunman had failed twice to graduate from the high school he attacked on Tuesday. When officers stormed his apartment on Tuesday afternoon, they found a nonfunctioning pipe bomb and plans for another attack, the police said, without providing further details about any other targets.
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