Five feared killed in horror school shooting as armed police swarm scene
The BORG Dreierschützengasse school is being evacuated with officers swarming the scene. Austrian special task force Cobra has also been deployed to the horror incident, which unfolded at about 10am local time.
There are fears as many as five people may have been killed and multiple people injured, according to local media, and a police spokesperson believes the shooter may be a pupil at the school.
Students and teachers are believed to be among the victims.
Federal police have been deployed to the scene, according to local reports.
Cobra units - armed special forces part of the Federal Ministry of the Interior - have rushed to a community administered hospital nearby the shooting site.
At keast five people may have died following the school shooting this morning.
Police rushed to the scene at around 10am local time (9am GMT) this morning, in the Dreierschützengasse neighborhood, with a local spokesperson telling national broadcaster ORF early on that one person may have died. Fritz Grundnig said one person "possibly also dead" following the shooting.
Police have confirmed in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Cobra units were deployed to the site of the suspected shooting this morning.
+++Aktuell läuft in der Dreierschützengasse in #Graz ein Polizeieinsatz. Bitte an die Anweisungen der Polizeikräfte halten. +++ #graz1006
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Daily Mirror
18 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Woman smashed into ground from 4,000ft and survived – then terrifying truth emerged
A woman who miraculously escaped death after her parachute failed discovered that her horrific fall was no accident – and that her husband had tried to kill her twice After seeing a woman jump from an aircraft 4,000 feet up, onlookers could only watch in horror as her body slammed into the ground. In what at first appeared to be a freak accident, both the main and reserve chutes that keen skydiver Victoria Cilliers had been using that day failed to open. Speaking on the documentary SkyDive Murder Plot, Rob Camps, secretary of the parachuting club at Nertheravon Airfield in Witfield, said that it looked almost as if a 'bag of washing' had been thrown out of the plane. He added that it was 'sickening' to watch as Victoria fell for around 25 seconds. He had assumed that her fall would be fatal, and had even grabbed a body-bag before running to the field where she had landed. But what Paul discovered in the days following the horrific incident revealed that Victoria's fall had been no accident – but attempted murder. Victoria was an experienced skydiver, an accredited accelerated freefall (AFF) instructor with 2,654 jumps to her name, but nothing she could do during that terrifying 25-second fall could have prevented that bone-crushing impact. But miraculously, Victoria survived. She had suffered severe spinal and internal injuries, as well as a broken pelvis and five broken ribs, but was well enough to be interviewed by police a few days later. Police took an interest in Victoria's accident after an examination of her parachutes had revealed that the soft links – important components known to insiders as 'slinks' – seemed to be missing from both of parachutes. Without them, jumping out of an aircraft from 4,000 feet would mean almost certain death. Rob Camps had called in the police after he checked her parachute and realised what had happened. Investigators' suspicions quickly fell upon Emile Cilliers, Victoria' husband and the father of her two children. He had been with her the previous day, when a planned parachute jump had been called off due to bad weather, and had inexplicably carried her parachute with him into the loos when one of their children said she needed to use the toilet. Study of the 38-year-old army officer's phone records indicated that he had not only been cheating on his wife with another woman, an Austrian skydiving instructor he'd met on Tinder, but had also amassed significant debts due to his regular use of sex workers. But the problem for detectives investigating the case was that Victoria was unable to accept that the father of her two children could ever want to kill her. She remained under the charismatic South African's spell even after evidence emerged that the sabotage of Victoria's parachute was not Emile's first attempt on her life. Six days before that fateful parachute jump, Victoria had noticed a strong smell of gas in her kitchen. Emile had not been at home, telling his wife he was staying at the army barracks so he could get an early start in the morning. Examination of the gas pipes leading into the house showed irrefutable evidence that Emile had tampered with the valve – and that he had been perfectly willing to kill his children, as well as his wife. A check of his internet search history showed that he had been researching the availability of wet-nurses to feed their newborn baby before his wife's expected death. Still, Victoria found it hard to accept the truth, even after police presented her with the irrefutable evidence of her husband's guilt. She did eventually agree to testify against him, but in a huge twist changed her evidence on the witness stand, raising the possibility that she might somehow have been responsible for the accident. She testified that she had misled police in her initial interviews, and had exaggerated the time that he had been in the ops with her parachute: 'I made it sound worse than it was because I was humiliated. I wanted him to suffer." Emile consistently denied attempting to kill his wife throughout a seven-week trial at Winchester Crown Court and the jury eventually sent a note to the judge stating they would be unable to reach a verdict. With the prospect of a retrial, DI Paul Franklin and DC Maddy Hennah were sent back to the drawing-board. They doggedly assembled more evidence, interviewing Emile's ex-wife, Carly Cilliers, mother to two of his older children. They discovered that he had also rekindled his relationship with her. DI Franklin said that Emile's ability to lie so smoothly to all of the women in his life was the hallmark of a psychopath. He continued: 'He can have a conversation with his wife about picking up the children or a bit of shopping at the same time as arranging to meet someone he knows from Fabswingers for some weekend fun, and ringing someone from Adultwork to see if they are available. 'Three totally separate conversations at the same time, managed in such a way that there was never a wrong phone call to the wrong person. When you see that repeated constantly for years, you see what kind of person he was.' Even after Victoria's near-fatal fall, Emile was texting sex workers from her hospital bedside and arranging to meet them nearby. But Emile's lies began to unravel at his retrial and he was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, as well as a third charge of recklessly endangering life. He received a minimum 18-year sentence. Meanwhile – at the same parachute club where she so narrowly escaped death – Victoria met former Royal Marine Simon Goodman and the two were married in October 2024.
New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
The politics of murder
Photo by STR/HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF SARAJEVO/AFP via Getty Image In Geoffrey Household's superlative thriller Rogue Male, from 1939, an English assassin-adventurer takes a potshot at Adolf Hitler and then flees for his life. An assassin's intended victim is usually a 'Hitler' of some sort. In July 2024, in Pennsylvania, an American youth aimed a rifle at Donald Trump from a rooftop and pulled the trigger. He was dispatched by a team of counter-snipers before he could take better aim and – conceivably – alter the fate of nations. What was his motive? Assassins are often seen as lone wolves with a sense of grievance against a perceived oppressor. Gavrilo Princip, the teenage Bosnian Serb who espoused the anti-Austrian cause, saw a potential tyrant in Archduke Franz Ferdinand after Bosnia was forcibly occupied by imperial Vienna. In 1914, Princip shot dead the heir to the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo. Princip's was, by a long chalk, the most clamorous assassination in modern history: it precipitated the First World War. Through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun, the 1914-18 conflict killed and wounded more than 35 million people, both military and civilian. Yet, as Simon Ball points out in Death to Order, his impeccably researched history of assassination from 1914 to the present day, Princip did not himself foresee the war's terrible carnage. His aim, rather, was to liberate swathes of the future Yugoslavia from Austro-Habsburg dominance and create a united south Slavic state. With Sarajevo as his starting point, Ball considers the impact of targeted murder on international politics over the past 110 years. The 'catastrophic detonator effect' of Princip's assassination led not only to the collapse of Vienna's double-headed eagle empire but also, Ball reminds us, to a vastly expanded Serb-ruled polity that was only finally dismantled in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. For Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, unsurprisingly, Princip was a nationalist hero who anticipated the Slav unification project under communism; for others (Hitler among them) he was a squalid stalker who shattered the equilibrium of Europe and represented a dangerous new type of assassin who shaped the exercise of power on the world stage. As well as discussing the figure of the lone killer, Ball, a historian from the University of Leeds, introduces us to the techniques of state-sponsored assassination down the decades and to the leaders who have made use of murder, from Joseph Stalin to Augusto Pinochet. One of the most consequential of post-Sarajevo assassinations occurred in Leningrad in 1934 when an unemployed malcontent 'confessed' under torture that he had killed the local party boss Sergei Kirov as part of a vast anti-Stalin plot. This gave Stalin the excuse he needed to scythe down all perceived enemies. The Kremlin whipped itself into a frenzy as alleged conspirators were found guilty and executed. Leon Trotsky, having helped to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in 1917, was now apparently a counter-revolutionary traitor whose time was up. In August 1940, the Spanish Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader struck Trotsky on the head with an ice pick while he was at work in his study in Mexico City. The monster that Trotsky had helped to create – the Soviet Union – had now destroyed him. As Stalin put it: 'No man, no problem.' Ball asks if there such a thing as an 'honourable' assassin. He has some sympathy for the Anglo-Irish peer's daughter Violet Gibson who, in 1926, shot Mussolini in the face at close range in Rome amid a crowd of horrified fascists. The bullet snicked the tip of his nose. Mussolini's (surprisingly charitable) view was that Gibson was 'insane' and therefore could not be detained as a political criminal. She was an embarrassment to the British government, though, as the Duce was feted in most English newspapers and was on good terms with King George V. In 1928, two years after her attempt on the dictator's life, Gibson was transferred to Britain to a mental home in Northampton, where she remained until her death in 1956, unwept for and forgotten. Assassination is a political instrument that can decide a nation's fate abruptly, says Ball. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who put the bomb in Hitler's briefcase, was unquestionably an honourable failed assassin. Five people died from the blast in Hitler's GHQ in East Prussia on 20 July 1944 – yet the Führer sustained no more than damage to his eardrums and a pair of scorched trousers. It was the 43rd attempt on his life; the botched assassination only fortified his messianic belief in his invulnerability. The July Plot, though unsuccessful, became a foundation myth of Germany's postwar Federal Republic: there were Germans who had opposed Hitler after all. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The 1960s American trinity of the assassinated – John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King , Robert F Kennedy – inevitably lies at the heart of Death to Order. On 4 April 1968, a petty conman named James Earl Ray shot the 39-year-old King with a hunting rifle from the window of a Memphis boarding house and fled the scene in a Ford Mustang. With more than 3,500 FBI agents on his trail, Ray became the subject of the largest and most costly manhunt in US history. For over two months he managed to evade capture until Scotland Yard tracked him down to a hotel in Pimlico, south-west London, from where he had planned to fly to Ian Smith's apartheid Rhodesia. Any American who championed the civil rights cause was made to feel threatened by King's assassination. In his informative pages, Ball chronicles a number of professional hits that took place in London before Sarajevo. Curzon Wyllie, an India Office official, was shot dead in South Kensington in July 1909 by a Punjabi Hindu fundamentalist. Wyllie's was the UK's first ever imperial assassination, and the herald of a spate of extra-legal killings by Hindu terrorist cells who opposed British rule. State-sponsored killers became ever more brazen as a subculture developed between terrorism and what Ball terms 'regime survival'. In 1978, in broad daylight, Iraqi intelligence mortally wounded Saddam Hussein's long-term rival Abdul Razzaq al-Naif as he got into a taxi in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel on Hyde Park Corner. Later that year, in another spectacular London assassination, the Soviets used a poisoned umbrella to eliminate the Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov as he crossed Waterloo Bridge. The paranoid, spook-ridden world of Frederick Forsyth had come to the British capital. Plastic explosives transformed assassination tradecraft as it could hit a target unerringly, Ball relates. In 1973 the Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco, an unrepentant Francoist, was killed by Basque separatists in an explosion so intense that it hurled his car up to the roof of a six-storey building. In the cruel humour of the British Foreign Office, Carrero Blanco was 'Spain's first man in space'. Premeditated political murders of this sort were occasionally bungled. One high-profile political assassination from 1973 shocked the inhabitants of the British dependency of Bermuda. In what Ball calls a 'post-imperial tragicomedy', Sir Richard Sharples, Governor of Bermuda, was ambushed during an evening stroll and, along with his dog and aide-de-camp, gunned down by members of a rackety anti-colonial group called the Black Beret Cadre. The assassins were captured and, in 1977, hanged, even though the death penalty had been abolished in Bermuda. Sir Richard's assassins, Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn, were the last people to be executed anywhere in British-controlled territory. Of course, no amount of state security can guard against the appearance of the rogue operator. The Islamists who stabbed to death the British Conservative MP David Amess in his Essex constituency in 2021 and knifed Salman Rushdie 15 times in upstate New York in 2022 were, manifestly, individuals operating on their own. Ball hesitates to call them assassins; they were not Day of the Jackal-style hitmen in the pay of states antithetical to the Western world. Ball has written an exceptionally erudite and detailed history of assassination, packed with research drawn from government archives across the world. He begins and ends with Gavrilo Princip, who died of tuberculosis in a prison in Theresienstadt in 1918. The assassin was too young to be legally executed by the Habsburg state, being only 19 when his shot rang out that June a century ago in Sarajevo. Ian Thomson's books include 'The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica' (Faber & Faber) Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination Simon Ball Yale University Press, 408pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen] Related This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent
The Guardian
25-07-2025
- The Guardian
Thailand-Cambodia border clashes live: Bangkok accuses Phnom Penh of targeting civilian areas as death toll rises to 16
Update: Date: 2025-07-25T05:08:55.000Z Title: Opening summary Content: Hello and welcome to our live coverage of the clashes along the border of Thailand and Cambodia. The escalation of military exchanges between Thailand and Cambodia could move towards war, acting Thai prime minister Phumtham Wechayachai told reporters on Friday, as the death toll in the conflict rose to 16. At present the clashes have involved heavy weapons, he said. Thailand and Cambodia exchanged heavy artillery fire again on Friday morning as their worst fighting in more than a decade stretched for a second day. Thai authorities said 15 people had so far been killed, including 14 civilians, while a Cambodian official said one civilian had been killed although the Cambodian government has yet to give any official update on casualties. Thailand's military meanwhile accused Cambodia of using of long-range weapons to 'target civilian areas' and of committing 'barbaric acts' that 'have senselessly claimed the lives and inflicted injuries upon numerous innocent civilians'. Phnom Penh's landmine authority accused Thailand of using cluster munitions calling it a 'serious violation of humanitarian norms'. We'll bring you more on that soonest. In other developments: The UN security council will hold an emergency meeting on Friday over the deadly border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand, diplomatic sources told AFP. The meeting, requested by Cambodian prime minister Hun Manet, would be held behind closed doors at 3pm (1900 GMT), the sources said. Britain's foreign ministry advised against all but essential travel to parts of Cambodia and Thailand, both popular destinations for foreign tourists, after the fighting. Fighting was focused on six locations, the Thai army said on Thursday. Six Thai air force jets were deployed, hitting two 'Cambodian military targets on the ground', according to Thai military deputy spokesperson Ritcha Suksuwanon. Cambodia has not yet commented on casualties on its side. Defence ministry spokeswoman Maly Socheata refused to answer when asked about the issue at a news conference. Both sides blame the other for starting the fighting, which erupted near two temples on the border after weeks of tensions. On Wednesday, Thailand had expelled the Cambodian ambassador and recalled its own envoy after five members of a Thai military patrol were wounded by a landmine. Cambodia downgraded ties to 'the lowest level' on Thursday, pulling out all but one of its diplomats and expelling their Thai equivalents from Phnom Penh.
