ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A 10-year-old student was killed and seven others were wounded on Tuesday when a teenage girl carried out a knife attack at a middle school in northwestern Istanbul.
“Our leaders must find a solution to this. This could happen to any family,” Aysa, a neighborhood resident, told Rudaw's Omer Sonmez near the scene of the incident.
The suspect, identified by her initials FM, is a 25-year-old high school student who walked into Kayasehir Seyh Samil Imam Hatip Middle School wearing a school uniform and stabbed eight students at random. She was detained immediately after.
One of the victims died of her wounds in hospital, while two others are in critical condition. The remaining five students are reportedly in stable condition.
“A female high school student wearing a uniform walked into a middle school and attacked our children with a knife," Turkish education minister Yusuf Tekin said in a press conference attended by Rudaw, confirming that “one of our students who was in critical condition has passed away.”
Tuesday's attack is the first school violence incident in months, coming after Ankara arrested 400 people that Turkish authorities accused of plotting or sharing threats to stage attacks on schools.
In one such attack in April, an eighth-grade student in the southeastern province of Kahramanmaras opened fire indiscriminately in two classrooms, killing 10 people and wounding 20. Another attack later that month wounded 16 people in the southeastern province of Riha (Sanliurfa). The perpetrators in both incidents killed themselves afterward.
Also in mid-April, a 13-year-old student brought several firearms and a knife to a middle school, killing 11 students and a teacher and wounding 13 others before dying at the scene.
In the wake of the April attacks, Sezai Temelli, a lawmaker from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, told parliament there are more than 32 million unlicensed firearms in the country, adding that the figure is “only the official estimate.”
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