ISTANBUL — Just 24 hours after a separate school shooting left 16 wounded in southeastern Turkey, a second mass shooting at a middle school in the country’s southern Kahramanmaras province has sent the nation into mourning, leaving nine dead and 13 injured in an attack that upended Turkey’s long history of rare school violence. The shooter, identified by local officials as a 14-year-old eighth-grade student, carried five licensed firearms and seven ammunition magazines belonging to his father, a former police officer, into the school campus on Wednesday morning. What followed was chaos: the teen opened fire indiscriminately across two classrooms, forcing terrified students to leap from first-floor windows to escape the gunfire. Dramatic, AFP-verified footage captured by a nearby resident shows students scrambling across the school courtyard, with roughly 15 gunshots audible across a 90-second clip of the attack.
Turkey’s Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci confirmed that nine people lost their lives in the shooting, and 13 wounded people were rushed to local hospitals, with six patients remaining in intensive care and three in critical condition as of Wednesday evening. The shooter himself died during the incident, and local governor Mukerrem Unluer told reporters it remains unclear whether the death was a suicide or an accidental killing amid the chaos of the attack. Law enforcement has since detained the shooter’s father, Ugur Mersinli, for questioning, per reporting from Turkey’s official Anadolu Agency. Video released by Turkey’s private IHA news outlet showed emergency workers evacuating covered bodies from the campus, while dozens of distraught parents gathered outside the school gates waiting for updates on their children. Law enforcement has locked down the campus perimeter, and top Turkish officials including the interior and education ministers traveled to Kahramanmaras to oversee the response, with prosecutors opening an immediate investigation into the incident.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered an official statement on social media platform X, calling the attack an unmitigated tragedy. “In this tragic attack, we unfortunately lost our bright young children and a devoted educator,” he wrote, adding that authorities would fully investigate every detail of the shooting and urging the public not to politicize the national grief. The Wednesday shooting follows a similar attack just one day prior, in Sanliurfa province’s Siverek district, where a former student opened fire with a shotgun at his old high school, wounding 16 people — 10 of them students — before killing himself during a police confrontation. Following the Tuesday attack, law enforcement detained one suspect and suspended four school officials from their posts, and ordered the affected school closed for four days.
The back-to-back attacks have sparked urgent debate over school safety across Turkey. Main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Ozgur Ozel argued that the violence can no longer be written off as a series of isolated events. “At this point, it is clearly evident that violence in schools can no longer be explained by isolated incidents,” Ozel wrote on X. “This issue has turned into a growing and deepening security vulnerability.” He called for immediate implementation of sweeping new security measures, including full access control at all school entry and exit points, increased on-campus security staff, upgraded campus camera systems, more frequent police patrols around school grounds, and updated emergency response plans. “The security of schools is entrusted to our state. No negligence or deficiency in this regard can be excused anymore,” Ozel added.
Until this week, school shootings have been extremely rare in Turkey, which enforces some of the strictest gun control regulations in the region. All firearms in the country require official licensing, mandatory registration, mental health screenings and criminal background checks for owners, with heavy criminal penalties for unlicensed gun possession. The most recent high-profile school shooting prior to this week occurred in May 2024 in Istanbul, where a expelled former student shot and killed a private high school principal months after he was dismissed from the school.