By Ene Rebecca
August 7, 2026
A 14-year-old Thai student fatally shot his grandparents before killing five people and himself at a school outside Bangkok on Friday, police said, in what authorities described as the country’s worst mass killing since 2022.
The victims at Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Bang Kruai district, Nonthaburi province, on the northwestern outskirts of the capital, were all teachers and staff, according to police. The teenager used a gun belonging to his grandfather and fired at least 26 bullets. An additional 34 rounds were recovered at the scene. Twenty-three people were wounded.
Students fled the school as the injured were taken away in ambulances. One 18-year-old student told Reuters he initially mistook the noise for firecrackers. “I didn’t think it was a gun at first,” he said. “There were many shots: bang, bang, bang. Then it went quiet. Then it started again.”
Education Minister Prasert Jantararuangtong said both teachers and students were among the casualties and that the motive was under investigation. Emergency worker Kiatikhun Verapongpradith, 47, said his team treated students with injuries to the back, chest and arms. They found a male teacher dead on an upper floor and a female teacher wounded in the chest and arm. After hearing a final shot, they found the perpetrator had shot himself in the right side of the head; he still had a pulse and received CPR.
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul called the incident “terrible” and expressed sadness for the victims and that such an event had occurred in the country. The school had about 3,100 students and 147 teachers in the 2025 academic year.
The attack was the second school shooting in Thailand this year, following an incident in the south in February in which a teacher was killed and a student injured. It follows a series of high-profile gun rampages in recent years in a country that has the largest number of civilian-owned firearms in Southeast Asia.
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