Thai nursery bloodbath

A former police officer shot dead at least 35 people, most of them children, when he stormed a nursery in Thailand yesterday in one of the kingdom's deadliest mass killings.

Gunman Panya Khamrab then went home and killed his wife and child before taking his own life, police said.

Armed with a shotgun, pistol and knife, Panya opened fire on the childcare center in northeastern Nong Bua Lam Phu province at about 12.30pm.

Police Colonel Jakkapat Vijitraithaya said the gunman killed 35 people, including 23 children and his own family, and wounded 12 others. Other reports said at least 24 children, mostly preschoolers, died. Another 12 people were wounded.

Nanthicha Punchum, acting chief of the nursery, told of harrowing scenes as the attacker barged into the building.

"There were some staff eating lunch outside the nursery and the attacker parked his car and shot four of them dead," she said. "The shooter smashed down the door with his leg and then came inside and started slashing the children's heads with a knife."

Footage showed distraught parents weeping in a shelter outside the nursery, a yellow single-story building set in a garden.

The 34-year-old gunman was a former police sergeant suspended in January and sacked in June for drug use, National Police chief Damrongsak Kittiprapat said.

He said the attacker was in a manic state but it was unknown whether it was drug-related. "We have to test his blood for drugs," he said. "What happened will be a lesson to prevent this happening again in the future."

Damrongsak said the pistol had been purchased legally and was a privately owned weapon, not police property.

Witness Paweena Purichan, 31, said the attacker was well-known in the area as a drug addict. She said she encountered Panya driving erratically as he fled the scene.

"The attacker rammed a motorbike into two people who were injured. I sped off to get away from him," she said. "There was blood everywhere."

Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha ordered the national police chief to "fast-track an investigation" and said he would travel to the scene of the attack today.

"This should not happen. This absolutely should not happen," Prayut said.

The mass killing comes less than a month after a serving army officer shot dead two colleagues at a military training base in the capital Bangkok.

While Thailand has high rates of gun ownership, mass shootings are rare.

But in the past year, there have been at least two other cases of shooting murders by serving soldiers, according to local media.

In 2020, in one of the kingdom's deadliest incidents in recent years, a soldier gunned down 29 people in a 17-hour rampage and wounded scores more before he was shot dead by commandos.

That mass shooting, linked to a debt dispute between gunman sergeant-major Jakrapanth Thomma and a senior officer, triggered public anger against the military.

The soldier was able to steal assault rifles from an army depot before embarking on his killing spree, posting live updates on social media as he did so.