Istanbul, 15 April 2026 (dpa/MIA) – Nine people were killed in a school shooting in south-eastern Turkey on Wednesday, Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftci said.

It was the second deadly school shooting in less than 24 hours, shocking a country where such incidents are relatively rare. Opposition parties have called for increased security measures at schools.

Eight students and one teacher were killed, while 13 others were wounded, six of them in intensive care, Çiftci told reporters in Kahramanmaraş province.

"The student, with the guns he brought from home, carried out a major massacre at the school," he said.

The assailant, an eighth-grade student at the secondary school, opened fire indiscriminately in two classrooms and is also dead, though it was not yet known how he died, Kahramanmaraş Governor Mükerrem Ünlüer said earlier.

It was not immediately clear whether the death toll includes the 14-year-old attacker.

"I jumped out of the window in fear for my life. I broke my leg," state news agency Anadolu quoted a fifth-grade student, Fatma İkra Çam, as saying at the Kahramanmaraş hospital.

She said she was caught by a deputy headmaster below while other classmates also tried escaping through the window in panic and were injured.

Kahramanmaraş Ayser Çalık Ortaokulu’nda yaşanan silahlı saldırıda öğrenciler okul camlarından atlayarak hayatta kalmaya çalıştılar.#kahramanmaraş pic.twitter.com/5SLTcwKQig

— Sol Yumruk (@Sol_Yumrukk) April 15, 2026

The suspect is believed to have carried in his backpack weapons he took from his father, a former police officer, according to the governor. The father, as well as the mother, were detained shortly after the attack, state news agency Anadolu reported.

An investigation is under way, and the motive remains unclear.

The incident comes a day after a separate shooting at a high school in the south-eastern city of Şanlıurfa, not far from Kahramanmaraş, where 16 people, including 10 students, were wounded. The attacker in that case, a former student, later killed himself, according to the Interior Ministry.

"We are in deep sorrow," Çiftci said, adding that authorities do not consider the incidents to be a terrorist attack but rather an individual act.

He said schools in both provinces will remain closed through Friday.

There are over 74,000 elementary and secondary schools in Turkey, according to education ministry data.

An analyst told CNN Türk on Wednesday that emerging local gangs in urban centres are increasingly influencing Turkish youth, encouraging violence through social media platforms as well as online games featuring violent content.

Meanwhile, authorities launched legal action against social media users for spreading "disinformation" and "provocative" content, the presidential communication office wrote on X platform.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan urged restraint and asked the public to disregard "misinformation" in the face of national grief.

Photo: X