Austrian Hitman Shot Dead Eight Persons 💔

Austria 🇦🇹 will hold three days of national mourning 🖤 after a 21-year-old man shot dead eight pupils and an adult at his old high school 🏫 and injured several others before turning his weapon on himself.

A tenth victim who had been in critical condition subsequently died, local media reported on Tuesday evening. Eleven others were being treated in local hospitals for injuries sustained in the attack 🏥.

Visibly moved at a media conference, the chancellor, Christian Stocker, announced a minute’s silence ⏳ for 10am on Wednesday to start the period of mourning for the victims of Austria’s deadliest postwar mass shooting 💥.

“The attack on Tuesday morning in the southern city of Graz was ‘a dark day in the history of our country,’ an act of ‘unimaginable violence’ and ‘a national tragedy that has shocked us all,”

he said.

The interior minister, Gerhard Karner, said six of the victims who died at the scene were female and three male. He said the presumed shooter, a former pupil at the school who had left before graduating, had acted alone and was among the dead 💀.

The mayor of Graz, Elke Kahr, had earlier said that an adult – thought to be a teacher at the school – was among the fatalities 👨‍🏫.

The gunman opened fire in two classrooms, one of which had once been his own, soon after 10am local time (0900 BST) 🔫. Police gave the all-clear about 90 minutes later, after a major security operation involving a special forces unit and several helicopters 🚁.

A police spokesperson told reporters the suspect was a 21-year-old Austrian national who was armed with two weapons that he owned legally, and had no criminal record 🧐. His name has not been released.

“Everything else, and many other things have been speculated about at this point in time, is simply speculation,”

the interior minister told reporters, adding that no further details would be announced because of the active police investigation 🔍.

“Out of consideration for family members, only reliable information will be released to the public,”

Karner said. He said nothing concrete could yet be said about the possible motive of the gunman 🤐.

#Austria #deadpersons #shot

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The MIT Physicist Was Brutally Shot in His Home


The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) community is grieving after the “shocking” shooting death of the director of its plasma science Android fusion center, according to officials.

Nuno Loureiro, 47, had been shot multiple times at his home in Brookline on Monday night when police said they received a call to investigate.

Emergency responders brought Loureiro to a hospital, and the award-winning scientist was pronounced dead there Tuesday morning, the Norfolk county district attorney’s office said in a statement.

The statement from the district attorney’s office said an investigation into Loureiro’s slaying remained ongoing later Tuesday.

But the agency did not immediately release any details about a possible suspect or motive in the killing, which gained widespread attention across academic circles, the US and in Loureiro’s native Portugal.

Portugal’s minster of foreign affairs announced Loureiro’s death in a public hearing Tuesday, as CNN reported.

Separately, MIT president Sally Kornbluth issued a university-wide letter expressing “great sadness” over the death of Loureiro, whose survivors include his wife.

“This shocking loss for our community comes in a period of disturbing violence in many other places,” said Kornbluth’s letter, released after a weekend marred by deadly mass shootings at Brown University in Rhode Island as well as on Australia’s Bondi Beach.

The letter concluded by providing a list of mental health resources, saying: “It’s entirely natural to feel the need for comfort and support.”

Kornbluth said Loureiro was born in central Portugal, and had aspired to be a scientist since childhood.

He obtained undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in physics from Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico and London’s Imperial College, respectively.

He completed postdoctoral work at Princeton University’s plasma physics laboratory in New Jersey and at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, which is the UK’s national lab for such research.

Loureiro then returned to Portugal to serve as the principal investigator for the Instituto Superior Técnico’s institute for plasmas and nuclear fusion before joining MIT’s faculty in 2016.

In 2022, MIT appointed him as the deputy director of its plasma science and fusion center. Loureiro had been that lab’s director since May 2024.

Loureiro in January received one of fewer than 400 early career awards for scientists and engineers given out by Joe Biden, who was reaching the end of his presidency at the time.

#MIT #Loureiro #shot #plasma #science

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On Khamenei’s Orders, the Police Shot Dead 30,000 People

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

Оn Thursday 8 January, in a midsize Iranian town, Dr Darish Ahmadi’s phone began to buzz. His colleagues in local emergency wards were getting worried.

All week, people had taken to the streets and had been met by police with batons and pellet guns. With treatment, their injuries should not have been too serious.

But emergency room staff believed many wounded young people were avoiding hospitals, terrified that registering as trauma patients would lead to their identification and arrest.

Quietly, Ahmadi and his wife began treating patients at a location outside Iran’s government hospital system. Alerted by a local whisper network, wounded young people flocked to them. Mostly, they brought superficial injuries – laceration wounds needing stitches and antibiotics.

As Thursday evening wore on, more and more arrived to be patched up.
The next day, everything abruptly changed.

Protesters kept coming, but their injuries were close-range gunshots and severe stab wounds, typically to the chest, eyes and genitals. Many proved fatal.

Ahmadi was shocked by the number being killed – more than 40 in his small town alone – but with the internet blacked out, no one knew what the national picture was.

To piece it together, Ahmadi assembled a network of more than 80 medical professionals across 12 of Iran’s 31 provinces to share observations and data, and to build a clearer picture of the violence.

Their observations begin to reveal the vast scale of violence inflicted on Iranians during the state’s crackdown.

Ahmadi and his colleagues are hesitant to provide a figure for the toll but agree “all publicly cited death tolls represent a severe underestimation”.

Comparing the number of dead they witnessed with hospital baselines, they estimate it could exceed 30,000, far surpassing official figures. This is based on the conclusion that “officially registered deaths related to the crackdown likely represent less than 10% of the real number of fatalities”.

Estimates of the number killed vary substantially, hampered by the ongoing internet shutdown.

#khamenei #police #shot #people

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🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

The Iranian government has acknowledged more than 3,000 dead, and the US-based organisation HRANA (Human Rights Activists News Agency), whose figures have been reliable during previous crackdowns, says it has verified more than 6,000 dead and has more than 17,000 more recorded deaths under investigation, giving a possible total of about 22,000.

Other estimates from doctors based outside Iran range up to 33,000 or more.

Testimony from morgues, graveyards and hospitals around the country reveal concerted efforts by authorities to conceal the true size of the toll: bodies being transported in ice-cream vans and meat trucks; piles of the dead being hastily buried; and hundreds of bodies apparently disappearing from Iran’s network of forensic facilities.

At one morgue, staff say they were confronted with several trucks loaded with bodies, far exceeding the facility’s refrigeration and storage capacity.

When staff protested that they could not process the volume of corpses, two trucks loaded with the dead were moved elsewhere – but when the morgue workers tried to track down where the bodies had been taken, they found none of the large forensic facilities in the region had received them.

The doctors “expressed suspicion that this was linked to dafn-e dast-e jam’i [mass burial]”.

His description is echoed by Ahmadi and his network, who say they observed a pattern across multiple towns of “refrigerated trucks normally used for ice-cream or meat” that were “moving in convoys to forensic medicine facilities and hospital back entrances”.

One witness at Behesht-e Sakineh, who was granted access to the site to look for the body of a friend, says he personally searched through hundreds of “stacked” bodies and was told by graveyard staff that they had “received thousands of bodies just in the past two days”.

The accounts from Behesht-e Sakineh form just one example of what appears to be a national pattern, with forensic medical staff around the country reporting similar scenes.

Doctors and morgue staff emphasise that the types of injuries seen on patients and corpses indicate deliberate, systematic killing and maiming of protesters as opposed to random, chaotic shooting.

In some cases, the killings bore the hallmarks of executions. Medical workers at forensic facilities in two different Iranian towns described receiving bodies with close-range gunshot wounds to the head that had been transferred from hospital morgues while still attached to catheters, nasogastric tubes or endotracheal tubes.

Even as medical staff attempt to share their testimony and data, many fear that the true number of dead may never be known, concealed by an orchestrated national effort by authorities to obscure the death toll.

#khamenei #police #shot #people

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The American F-15E Has Been Shot Down. Trump is Booed ⚠️✈️

A US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter has been shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic US search and rescue effort for its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the start of the five week long war.

Iranian state media released images of a tail fin and other debris early on Friday accompanied by an initial claim that a US F-35 had been hit by a new air defence system over central Iran and the pilot probably killed.

Aviation experts said the wreckage pictured was in fact from a F-15E, from the US air force’s 494th squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, though it could not at first be confirmed when and where the pictures were taken.

US officials familiar with the situation later confirmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scrambling to find the crew before the Iranians. There was no official comment from the US military about the incident.

One crew member was reported as having been rescued as the situation developed, in what is likely to have been a high-risk operation with rescue aircraft probably exposed to fire from the ground. It was not immediately clear if the jet had a full crew of two. 🚁

Justin Bronk, an aviation expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said the use of the specialist helicopters “suggested a combat search and rescue mission is under way to locate and extract the two aircrew from the F-15E”.

No US troops have so far been taken prisoner by Iran. A total of 13 American service personnel have been killed and 300 have been wounded during a campaign in which more than 12,300 targets in Iran have been bombed by the US alone.

A social media account claiming to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards posted a picture of an ejector seat in a desert landscape, which appeared to be consistent with the ACES II type used in F-15Es. Bronk said: “If genuine, it would suggest that at least one of the two aircrew did eject safely.”

The presenter on an Iranian TV channel urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police and promised a reward for anyone who did. That channel is based in Kohkilouyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, a mountainous region in the south-west of the country.

Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that the pilot of the jet – still incorrectly describing it as an F-35 – had been taken into custody, contradicting Tehran’s initial claim that the pilot had probably died in the incident.

Overnight, the US Central Command, which is leading the attack on Iran, had denied Iranian claims that another F-35 jet had been downed over Qeshm Island in the strait of Hormuz. “All US fighter aircraft are accounted for,” it said at the time.

Up to now no US fighter jets had been lost over Iran during the five-week-long conflict, though three F-15Es were shot down by a Kuwaiti air defence system in a dramatic friendly fire incident on 1 March.

An F-35 fighter reportedly had to make an emergency landing at a US airbase in the Middle East after sustaining damage from the ground.

A US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft was destroyed at the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia on 27 March in an Iranian strike. 💥

#f15 #trump #shot #iran #war #strike

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