ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — An attacker opened fire near a high school in western Turkey on Tuesday and wounded at least eight people, officials said. The suspected shooter was arrested.
The attack took place in front of a vocational and technical high school in Turgutlu district, in Manisa province, the provincial governor’s office said in a statement. Police and medical teams were immediately sent to the scene.
HaberTurk news channel said the assailant was a student at the school. The report added that he arrived at the scene armed with a shotgun he took from his grandmother's house and fired randomly near the school before trying to flee the scene on foot.
The injured were rushed to hospitals for treatment, the governor's office said, without providing information on their conditions.
The motive for the attack was under investigation, it added.
“After the incident, the suspect believed to have fired the weapon was caught by security forces and taken into custody,” the statement read.
Anxious parents rushed to the school and confrontations broke out between them and police who blocked entrance to the building, Cumhuriyet newspaper reported.
The attack came months after Turkey was shocked by two school shootings this year. The government increased security at educational facilities at the start of the academic year last week.
In April, 16 people, mostly students, were wounded when a former student opened fire at a high school in Sanliurfa province in Turkey's southeast. The assailant later killed himself.
The next day, a 14-year-old student opened fire on two classrooms at his school in nearby Kahramanmaras province, killing eight students and a teacher and wounding 13 others. The attacker was killed by police.
