Rare School Shootings Kill Nine in Turkey, Shock Nation

Turkey was shaken by an unusually violent 24 hours in its schools, after a 14-year-old opened fire at Ayser Çalık Secondary School in Kahramanmaraş province and killed nine people, and a former student attacked a vocational high school in Siverek, Şanlıurfa province, the day before. School shootings are rare in Turkey, which is why the back-to-back attacks have prompted urgent questions about access to weapons, school security and whether the country is confronting a one-off trauma or a darker warning.

In Kahramanmaraş, the 14-year-old shooter killed eight students and one teacher and wounded 13 others, six of them critically. Authorities said he carried five firearms and seven magazines, and early reports said the weapons appeared to belong to his father, a former police officer. The attack at Ayser Çalık Secondary School sent students jumping from windows and fleeing the courtyard as parents rushed to the scene.

The day before, a former student opened fire at his old high school in Siverek, wounding at least 16 people before killing himself in a confrontation with police. At least 10 students, four teachers, one police officer and one cafeteria worker were among the injured. Together, the two attacks turned a grim news cycle into a national reckoning over how easily firearms can enter school grounds and how quickly a classroom can become a crime scene.

The killings revived memories of the May 2024 shooting in Istanbul, when former student Yousif K. fatally shot principal İbrahim Oktugan months after being expelled. That death triggered protests, a nationwide debate on school safety and later demonstrations by thousands of teachers. Education unions also called strikes, demanding better protection for staff and safer working conditions inside schools.

Prosecutors opened an immediate investigation into the latest shootings, and schools in Kahramanmaraş province were ordered closed for two days. For officials, educators and families, the central questions now are blunt: how a teenager obtained multiple guns, why warning signs did not stop the attack, and whether Turkey’s rare school shootings are becoming more than isolated shocks.