Polish leader says school attacks were fueled by online glorification of violence

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The attacks at Polish schools over the past week were “spontaneous acts” driven by the online “glorification of violence,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Sunday.

Three attacks at schools in the Mazovian province in central Poland took place within four days this week, leaving one dead and many wounded, including children.

By Sunday morning, police had detained 117 people across Poland for carrying knives or other dangerous weapons, or for threatening to attack schools or fellow students. Some 64,000 schools were checked.

“We are not dealing with any group organized on a big scale,” Tusk said on Sunday morning, during a crisis meeting with government and security services. “These are very often spontaneous actions inspired by online activity.”

“In the past years and months, we have noted — globally and in Poland — a rise in the fascination with violence.”

Tusk said the acts could be associated with “nihilistic violence,” a term used by authorities to describe acts of violence driven by a nihilistic worldview and misanthropy rather than specific political goals.

In the case of Poland, he said “some of the people detained are active in the ultraright environment." He said authorities have observed intensified online searches of Nazi content as well as of “mass killers who have become idols online.”

Tusk said Poland was facing a “civilizational phenomenon” where kids playing video games, even banal ones, or those interested in crime stories, were getting exposed to more and more violence.

“This is essentially a copycat scenario, something of a long trail of attackers going back to at least 2019, if not decades earlier,” Kacper Rekawek, senior researcher at the International Center for Counterterrorism in The Hague, told the AP. He was referring to Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who shot and killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Rekawek said that one of the suspects in the latest Polish attacks used the same imagery and esthetics as Tarrant, which means the Polish incidents should be “placed within the confines of essentially terrorist behavior.”

Tusk said police checks at schools across Poland would continue into next week in case kids exposed to the stories of the past attacks might “get stupid and unsafe thoughts” to imitate them.

He said Poland had lots of work to do as a society, with parents and teachers having an especially important role to play in communicating with kids about their experiences online and explaining that “fascination and membership in these online practices can lead to very negative consequences.”

On Wednesday, a 19-year-old student at a vocational school in the Mazovian province attacked fellow students, teachers and passersby with a sharp object, wounding nine people. He was arrested nearby. The following day, a 15-year-old killed a school custodian and wounded two other people in a knife attack at his former school in the same province. On Saturday, a 21-year old woman wounded three at a post-secondary school in Warsaw.

Rumors that the attacks were coordinated and that there would be more on “bloody Friday” were shared in parents’ online groups and by mainstream media. It led to 59 schools preemptively suspending classes on Friday across Poland, the majority in Mazovian province.

Those detained on Friday by the police include a 14-year-old boy from Warsaw who was found in possession of a knife with a concealed blade and 11 firecrackers, and a 16-year old who came to school with a butterfly knife in his backpack, police said.