Warsaw, Oct 11. (dpa/GNA) – Three women were injured in a knife attack at a school in Warsaw on Saturday, Polish police said, the third such attack at a school in the country in just four days.
A 21-year-old female student, attacked the three women in the administrative office of an adult education school in the Polish capital’s Praga district around midday, a police spokesman told broadcaster TVP Info.
A 17-year-old student was taken to hospital with cuts to her forearms, while the other two victims, aged 17 and 24, were treated at the scene.
The victims had been handing in documents at the school office, when the attack occurred, police said.
A school employee disarmed the attacker and handed her over to officers, who arrived at the scene. The motive remains unclear.
Police said the suspect and the victims did not know one another. Investigators have so far found no evidence linking the latest attack to two other knife attacks at Polish schools earlier this week, the spokesman said.
On Thursday, a 37-year-old school caretaker was killed and two other people were injured in a knife attack by a 15-year-old at a school in Leszczydół-Nowiny, about 70 kilometres north-east of Warsaw.
A day earlier, a 19-year-old injured nine people with a knife, two of them seriously, at a vocational school in Ostrołęka, just under 100 kilometres north of Warsaw.
Polish police said on Saturday that 76 people had been arrested following the earlier attacks, as authorities stepped up security checks at schools nationwide.
Around 50,000 schools had been inspected across the country, police said on X. “A total of 231 incidents were registered in which police officers took action in connection with a reasonable suspicion of a criminal offence,” the statement said.
There was initially no information about the identities of those detained. Prime Minister Donald Tusk ordered regular police checks at all schools in the country on Thursday.
Many schools in the Mazovia region around Warsaw were closed on Friday. Tusk said the 15-year-old attacker in Leszczydół-Nowiny, had worn a helmet-mounted camera to film the crime.
Police cybercrime investigators subsequently examined whether a social media challenge was encouraging young people to carry out such attacks.
However, police said on Friday that they had found no evidence of such a trend.
GNA