Investigations into the shooter’s motives are underway The gunman who killed six people in Krakow’s historic main square had visited websites about Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, Poland’s justice minister has said. Michał Oksiński is believed to have killed his parents and sister at his home in eastern Poland, before driving to Krakow’s Old Town and shooting at random from his vehicle. He died in hospital on Monday. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek told Radio Krakow on Tuesday that investigators had gained access to the gunman’s computer and found he had visited sites about Breivik. The notorious murderer killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, in a bombing in Oslo and a shooting at a youth summer camp on the island of Utøya. Several mass killers since have cited his attacks as an inspiration. No message or letter The exact motives of the Krakow attacker remain unknown and Żurek said Oksiński had left no letter or message explaining his actions. Neighbors at the family’s flat in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, where the bodies of his parents and sister were found, said they had heard no shots. Żurek said on Tuesday that a silencer had been found in Oksiński’s car. Żurek said investigators would keep examining who Oksiński had been in contact with, whether he acted alone and what had inspired him. Paulina Piasecka, director of the Terrorism Research Center at Civitas University, told TVP World that officials would be looking for clues in the attacker’s online presence. “It’s not only the physical trace, it’s also the digital trace, it’s the social media accounts. It’s the communication, online communication, participation in various discussion fora or in closed Telegram channels,” she said. “I think that the people who are keeping guard over our security will look in even the smallest detail of the life of this perpetrator to find out everything that pushed him to this point, and whether or not there is anybody else we should be looking for,” she added. Four guns and 500 rounds Prosecutors said on Monday that investigators had found four guns, two AR-15 rifles and two pistols, on Oksiński and in his car, along with around 500 rounds of ammunition and four phones. Oksiński had held a firearms license since March and had belonged to a sports shooting club since 2022. A spokesman for the National Prosecutor’s Office said he had no information that Oksiński had received psychiatric treatment. Attack in the heart of the old town The attack began shortly after 3pm on Saturday, when Oksiński drove onto Krakow’s Main Square, one of Europe’s largest medieval town squares, and opened fire on passers-by. Six people were killed and more than a dozen injured, including two police officers. Thirteen people remain in hospital. Piasecka said attackers who radicalize alone online are particularly hard for the security services to spot. “If we in fact face a lone gunman, an active shooter, somebody who is self-radicalized by contact with what is found on the internet [...] then we have a problem because he’s not getting in touch with anybody who might be a threat, who might be considered a threat, who might be watched or monitored,” she said. She also pointed to a broader trend. “We’re facing the trend that the services, intelligence services, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, call nihilistic extremism. So the new trend in which violence becomes an end in itself, sort of a tool of a game or gamification of life,” she said. ‘Very secure country’ The incident has led to a debate about the increase in legal gun ownership in Poland, as well as other recent security incidents, but mass shootings are rare in Poland. “Poland is a very secure country,” Andrzej Derlatka, a former head of Poland’s foreign intelligence agency, told TVP World. “Everybody who visited Poland observed that we are actually unique in Europe as a secure country... you can walk around cities in the middle of the night without any danger.”
