An armed teenager opened fire at a high school in Thailand on Friday morning, killing three teachers and three students before committing suicide. Another fifteen people were injured in the shooting, which began at ten in the morning and lasted several minutes at the Debsirin Institute in Nonthaburi, a municipality adjacent to Bangkok, on the other side of the Chao Phraya River.
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The affected institute, with three thousand students of both sexes, is a branch of the Debsirin school – boys only – founded in 1885 in downtown Bangkok, which remains one of the most prestigious public educational institutions in the country.
The school is located about 15 kilometers from the Thai capital
The gun used in the massacre has been recovered. The killer pointed it at himself after being cornered in the computer room. Officers found traces of his path on several floors, from a teacher lying lifeless to a teacher wounded in the chest, along with a trail of injured or dead students.
The center, less than half an hour from Bangkok, witnessed scenes of distress and emotion as families reunited with students who had escaped the shooting unharmed, while ambulances took away the less fortunate and dozens of police cordoned off the crime scene.
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The police are currently investigating the identity and possible motives of the Nonthaburi killer. It is known in any case that he was a student of the center – he wore his sports uniform, lilac in color – and that he was between 14 and 15 years old. A slightly older student, 17, told a local media outlet that at first he thought it was someone hunting birds with a pellet gun, but then he saw from the classroom window the attacker, prowling with a pistol. Thanks to his civil defense knowledge, he blocked the classroom door by propping it up with desks, so the attacker had no choice but to move on. When the police rescued them, the danger had already passed.
Thailand has a high rate of firearms per capita, but shootings are not common. Throughout this decade, the two worst have been carried out by members of the security forces. In 2020, a soldier killed 29 people in the northeast of the country. In 2022, a former police officer killed 36 people in the same area – including 22 children sleeping in a daycare center – in a three-hour manhunt with firearms and machetes.
A Bangkok market also recorded five deaths in 2025. The other massacre by an armed teenager took place three years ago, in the well-known Paragon shopping center in Sukhumvit, Bangkok. More recently, last February, the principal of a school in Hat Yai, southern Thailand, died in another shooting, after a man burst into the center shooting, also taking teachers and students hostage, who were later released.
