Shooting at Ostrava hospital makes headlines around the world

Prague/Ostrava, North Moravia, Dec 11 (CTK) – Yesterday’s shooting in a waiting room of the Ostrava Teaching Hospital’s outpatient traumatology ward is being reported all over the world, with the UK’s BBC adding it to the front page of its news website.

The BBC also reminded that the 2015 fatal shooting in Uhersky Brod, south Moravia, after which the perpetrator took his own life as well, saw eight dead.

Earlier, the EU proposed a ban on some semiautomatic weapons and magazines in reaction to the terrorist attacks around Europe. The European Parliament, as well as the member countries, passed the ban in 2017.

The Czech Republic argued at the time that the regulation will infringe on the rights of gun owners and will not contribute to higher security.

Slovak media focused on the events in Ostrava in detail, with the pravda.sk server writing about “a massacre” and speculating if the attack was supposed to be a form of vengeance against the physicians.

The Polish TVN24 television included a special report in its programming and the server onet.pl published two articles and a photo gallery about the event.

“The Czech Republic is viewed as a safe country, it has never become target of a terrorist attack,” the Munich-based daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung has written on its website, and added that crimes committed by people running amok almost never occur in Czechia either.

The online portal of Austrian daily Die Presse, too, describes the Czech Republic as a “generally safe country” that was shaken by the shooting attack today.

Austrian tabloid paper Kronen Zeitung writes about “blodshed in a hospital.”

The news was reported in countries outside of Europe as well, for example on news servers in the Republic of South Africa, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, China and India.