Two students were killed and four others wounded on Friday when one of their classmates opened fire inside a school in the central Brazilian city of Goiania, authorities said.
Police described the shooter as the 14-year-old son of two police officers and said that he used one of his parents’ service weapons to carry out the attack, Efe reported.
Advertisement
The assailant pulled the gun from inside his backpack and began shooting at random inside a classroom holding roughly 30 students, witnesses said.
The incident happened shortly before midday at Colegio Goyases, a private school in an upscale neighbourhood of Goiania, capital of Goias state.
Paramedics said they took two young women and a boy of around 13 to a hospital in Goiania, while a fourth student in serious condition was flown by helicopter to another medical centre.
The suspect, whose father is a major in the state police, was apparently mad at classmates who mocked him for body odor, witnesses said.
One of the shooting victims had brought the shooter deodorant as a joke, according to the witness accounts.
“The preliminary information we received indicate that he (the shooter) was suffering bullying. He got tired of the aggression, took a gun that was in his house and fired the shots,” the head of the Goiania state police, Col. Anesio Barbosa da Cruz, told news Web site G1.