'Blood all over the faculty' - eyewitnesses recount Prague attack

Prof Radek Samik was teaching a class at Charles University when a gunman entered the building and started shooting indiscriminately.

Stuck inside a room on the first floor, he suddenly heard "very clear", single gunshots.

Aware that something was very wrong, he and his students stayed in the classroom, unable to leave, while the gunman carried out the worst mass shooting in Czech history.

Fourteen people were killed, and a further 25 injured, some very seriously, police said.

In a classroom on a higher floor was Jakob Weizman, a journalist and student at the university.

He was sitting a language exam in a small room, accompanied by one teacher, when he heard "gunshots" and "screaming".

Panicked, the two locked themselves in the classroom. He posted a picture on X, formerly known as Twitter, showing how they used chairs and tables to barricade themselves in.

Five minutes later, the gunman tried to open their classroom door. "He was going through each classroom to see if people were there to shoot them," Mr Weizman told the Guardian.

The pair were eventually evacuated from the building by police. "As we were walking out, there was just blood all over the faculty."

During the attack, video footage posted on social media showed people dangling from the balcony ledge, before jumping several metres to escape the shooting.

Prof Radek said a student described to him how they had broken through a window to get out of the building.

"They had a problem opening the window... so they broke the window" to get out, he told the BBC. He said he saw people who had problems walking after jumping out.

Another video posted on social media showed someone situated outside the building shouting at the gunman, who had made his way onto the building's balcony, in an attempt to get the attacker's attention.

"I am here, shoot here, come over here!" the person filming shouts in Czech. "I am here, here, look! And he's shooting at us now. I don't want him to shoot at the people."

University lecturer, Prof Sergey Medvedev was evacuated along with his students from the building's auditorium during the shooting.

"I was giving a lecture at that moment and at first didn't quite realise what happened because there were some sounds," he said.

"The students, I think, heard it better because I was so much concentrated on my talking, on my lecture. Then we stayed in the auditorium, we understood that something big is happening.

"There was nothing online yet, nothing in the Czech press and the networks. Then at some point the special operation groups went storming in."

He said security forces searched their room, before telling them to stay put inside. "Then one hour later another police squad broke in and then put us on the floor, briefly searched us then evacuated from the building."

Another member of staff, senior lecturer David Vichnar, who said he was taking an amplifier back to the arts buildings at the time, got stuck in a lift because of the shooting - the power had been switched off to prevent the shooter escaping.

"I had no clue, and suddenly there in the dark, in the elevator, I starting hearing this metallic, banging noise coming from somewhere up above," he told the BBC World Service's Newshour programme.

At the time, he thought it was someone repairing the lift, but it was in fact gunfire.

He said that at the time he had texted colleagues: "If this were the United States, I would say we have an active shooter situation. But hey, this is Prague, this can't be happening, right?"

Dr Vichnar did not understand what was going on until he managed to get out of the lift and ran into three members of a Swat team, who made him lie on the ground.

"Obviously [they] have no clue what I'm doing there. I'm a man who's dressed in black and carrying a large piece of some sort of equipment.

"I'm lucky that these were Swat members who first asked the questions, because I could have not been here to tell you the story."

Outside the university, in an area popular with tourists, Faig Jafarli, 27, was out on his coffee break from work when he noticed that a road near the university was shut.

Mr Jafarli, a former student of Charles University, said he was unsure of what was going on, until he saw a person through a university window holding their hands up, out of "the corner of my eye".

Realising that people around him - many of them tourists - didn't understand the instructions Czech police were giving out, Mr Jafarli started "screaming to the tourists that we needed to run".

"The tourists didn't understand anything, they were thinking it was like some sort of filming for a movie."

The shooting began at around 15:00 local time (14:00 GMT) on Thursday at the Faculty of Arts building of Charles University off Jan Palach Square in the centre of the Czech capital.

The gunman opened fire in the corridors and classrooms of the building, before shooting himself as security forces closed in on him, police said.

The victims of the attack have been identified but not publicly named by police.

Among those injured are three foreigners - one Dutch person and two from the United Arab Emirates, the interior ministry said.

The gunman is thought to have killed his father at a separate location, police said.

He is also suspected of killing a a man in his 30s and his two-month-old daughter who were found dead in a forest on the outskirts of Prague on 15 December.