Eight people and the two gunmen are among the dead in school shooting near São Paulo

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Eight people, including five schoolchildren, have been killed by gunmen who opened fire in a high school near São Paulo, before turning their guns on themselves when police arrived.

The two gunmen, ages 25 and 17, walked into the state school in Suzano, near São Paulo, around 9.30am on Wednesday, and opened fire while students were on a break.

The local police chief, Colonel Marcelo Salles, told reporters that the attackers were armed with a .38 revolver, a crossbow, a bow and arrows and also carried fake explosives. “In 34 years of service, I have never seen [an attack] with a crossbow. It is totally unthinkable,” he said.

One student, Rosni Grotliwed, 15, told the G1 news site that students were eating their morning snack when they heard popping sounds and started running.

“The guys came after us and started to kill lots of people,” he said. “They were shouting but I didn’t understand what it was.”

Caterer Silmara de Moraes, 54, said she helped hide 50 students in a kitchen. “It was really desperate because there were a lot of shots, really a lot of shots, and panic,” she told G1.

São Paulo’s security secretary João Pires de Campos said both attackers were former students at the school. Early on Wednesday, they shot and killed the owner of a business and stole a car they used to drive to the school.



They also carried a false bomb to confuse police. “It was a fake package,” de Campos said.

TV Globo news showed CCTV footage of terrified students fleeing the school as shockwaves reverberated around Brazil. Despite its sky-high murder rates, bloody gang wars, and prison riots Brazil rarely suffers the school shootings and mass killings which have become common in the United States.

“It’s the saddest scene I have ever seen in my life,” São Paulo’s state governor, João Doria, told reporters at the scene.

Brazil’s education minister, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, tweeted: “Children and young people are the most precious asset of a nation. It is unacceptable for them to suffer any kind of violence.”

Police named the two attackers as Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17, and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25, and said they had no information on the motive for the killing.

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Col Salles earlier said that before entering the Raul Brasil elementary and high school, the two men shot and wounded the owner of a nearby car wash. Only high school students were in the building at the time.

CCTV video showed the two young men getting out of a white car parked at the front of the school and walking into the school before students began running out of the gate.

The G1 news site said that four students died at the scene and two more died in hospital. Names have not yet been released.

Footage from the back of the school showed students jumping over a low wall before a side gate was opened and a police car arrived. The police arrived eight minutes after being called, Governor Doria said.

Brazil’s new far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, campaigned on a hardline anti-crime policy and promises to loosen restrictions on gun ownership.

More than four hours after news of the shooting first broke, President Bolsonaro offered his condolences on Twitter, describing the attack as “an immeasurable monstrosity and cowardice”.

“May God comfort everyone’s heart!” he tweeted.

His politician son Flávio Bolsonaro blamed the shooting on rules introduced in 2003 restricting the purchase and possession of firearms. “Yet another tragedy involving a minor and one that attests to the failure of the ill-fated disarmament statute, still in force,” he tweeted.

Bolsonaro promised to reform the 2003 Disarmament Statute in order to “guarantee the citizen’s right to legitimate defence”. In January, his government issued a decree making it easier for Brazilians to keep guns at home.

Brazil has the largest number of annual homicides in the world, but school shootings are rare. In 2011, Wellington de Oliveira, 23, killed 12 teenagers at a school in Rio de Janeiro. In 2017, security guard Damião dos Santos, 50, set fire to a creche in Minas Gerais state, killing himself and 12 others, including nine children.