Krakow shooting suspect dies as Poland reviews gun rules

The 24-year-old Polish man accused of carrying out a deadly shooting spree in Krakow died in hospital on Monday, two days after he was critically wounded in a gunbattle with police, authorities said.

Authorities said the man, dressed in military-style clothing, allegedly opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in a Krakow square, killing six people and wounding 15 others. The bodies of his parents and a sister were found at the family home in another town.

The dead included an Austrian woman and a British man, and the wounded included Austrian, British, German, Portuguese and Russian nationals. Authorities said the injured were in stable condition on Monday.

Two police officers, who were seriously wounded in the chase, shot the man at an intersection near the city’s Main Market Square. Regional authorities said the suspect was declared dead at about 4:30 a.m. after three operations. Regional police said on X that the “perpetrator of the tragic events” had died in hospital.

Polish media named the suspect as Michal Oksinski. Authorities had previously said he had been “fascinated by far-right ideologies”, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the shooting the deadliest in Poland since the fall of communism in 1989 and an act of “terrorism”.

But prosecutors said Monday there was no evidence tying the suspect to a specific political ideology. “We do not have findings that we could, in a responsible way, categorically state that he was inspired by any particular ideology,” national prosecutor’s office spokesman Przemyslaw Nowak said.

Nowak said it was too early to comment on the motive and that investigators had not found obvious symbols generally associated with a particular political movement. An interior ministry spokeswoman told Polish radio that emblems and patches on Oksinski’s clothing were being analysed.

Investigators are treating the shooting spree as a terrorist incident while the motive remains unclear. Polish media cited investigators as saying the suspect had no prior criminal record.

The suspect and his father were members of a shooting club. Investigators seized 11 firearms during a search. Polish media cited his grandmother as saying he obtained a gun licence this year.

After the shooting, Poland’s interior ministry announced a review of the conditions for granting gun licences, with licence-holders’ medical records to be updated regularly. Police figures said more than 50,000 new firearms licences were issued in Poland in 2025, bringing the total to 411,000.