Poland is in national mourning after a gunman killed six people in Kraków’s historic Main Market Square on Saturday — and police then found three more bodies at the suspect’s family home, bringing the death toll to nine. Prosecutors have now formally opened a terrorism investigation into what Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an attack unlike anything Poland has seen before.
Here is what is known so far, in the order it happened.
Saturday, just after 3pm: three minutes of gunfire
The attack began shortly after 3pm local time on Saturday, in the Rynek Główny — the Main Market Square at the heart of Kraków’s Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site packed with tourists and locals on a Saturday afternoon. Police say a man drove into the square and opened fire at random from his car. The shooting lasted about three minutes.
Six people were killed in the square: four women and two men. Among them were three Polish women aged 61, 53 and 51, a 50-year-old Polish man, a 32-year-old British man, and a 51-year-old woman whose nationality had not yet been confirmed. At least 15 more people were wounded, 12 of them seriously, according to the fire service and the regional governor.
Two police officers, Senior Constables Jakub Kulik and Artur Morański, confronted the gunman. He was shot and wounded in the exchange of fire, then arrested and taken to hospital, where he remains in a critical condition under guard.
Saturday night: three bodies in a flat 200 kilometres away
Hours later, police searched the suspect’s home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, a town in south-central Poland about 200 kilometres from Kraków. Inside the flat they found three bodies: a 53-year-old man, a 52-year-old woman and a 21-year-old woman. Police have since confirmed they were the gunman’s father, mother and sister, and investigators believe he killed them before driving to Kraków.
Polish media have identified the suspect only as Michał O., a 24-year-old, in line with Polish rules that protect suspects’ surnames. Police say he acted alone and have dismissed unconfirmed social media claims of a second gunman.
Sunday: Tusk calls it terrorism
On Sunday, Tusk said there were “strong indications” the three people found at the home were members of the gunman’s immediate family, and he left no doubt about how the government views the attack. “We have never had such drastic cases of terrorism in Poland before, because that is how we should call the attack in Krakow,” he said.
Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński said investigators believed the gunman was influenced by far-right ideology and held extreme nationalist views. “Everything points to the fact that the shooter was influenced by far-right ideology, a matter that will also be subject to investigation,” he told reporters. Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz denied reports that the suspect had served in the Polish military and described the incident as a “terror attack”.
President Karol Nawrocki declared national mourning for Sunday and Monday, and said he intends to award state honours to the officers who stopped the gunman. Kraków’s mayor, Łukasz Gibała, declared a period of mourning in the city until 11 November. Pope Leo XIV sent his condolences to Kraków’s archbishop.
Monday: post-mortems begin, terror probe formally opened
Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office has now formally opened an investigation into the killing of six people in Kraków and three in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, handling it as a single case classified as an act of a terrorist nature. Prosecutor Tomasz Waszczuk told Radio Kraków that terrorism is now “the version the prosecutor will treat as the most likely”.
Post-mortem examinations on all nine victims are due to begin on Monday morning and are likely to continue into Tuesday, prosecutor Eryk Stasielak of the National Prosecutor’s Office in Kraków told the Polish Press Agency. Investigators believe the attacks in both towns were carried out by one and the same person.
Questions remain. Police say the suspect held a firearms permit, and local media have reported that the guns used may have been taken from his family home. Many weapons and ammunition were found in his vehicle. How a 24-year-old with no known military service assembled such an arsenal — and what exactly drove him — is now the centre of the investigation. If he survives his wounds, prosecutors will decide on Monday what steps to take involving him.
Why this matters
Poland has not experienced a mass shooting of this kind in living memory, and the fact that the government is already calling it terrorism — before the motive is established — shows how seriously Warsaw is taking the far-right angle. The attack also lands in a Europe where lone-actor violence inspired by extremist ideology online has become a recurring fear for security services, and where the line between a disturbed individual and a terrorist is increasingly drawn by investigators in the first hours, not weeks. For Kraków, a city whose medieval square is one of Europe’s great tourist draws, the shock is also practical: a place built for crowds must now ask how it protects them.
Our earlier reporting: the first hours of the attack are covered in our report on the shooting in the Main Market Square, and the toll’s first revision in our update as the death toll rose to six.
Sources
Małopolska Police · Polish Ministry of the Interior and Administration
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Kraków’s mayor declared a period of mourning for the same two days as the national mourning. The city’s mourning period runs until 11 November. 9 November 2026
