Krakow (Poland) (AFP) – Usually packed with people, Krakow's market square, the jewel of the historic center of the former Polish capital, is empty on this mourning Sunday. The day before, a man shot dead six people in cold blood and injured fifteen others.

Published on: 08/11/2026 - 15:38Modified on: 08/11/2026 - 17:27

Only dozens of police officers continue their search, lifting each stone, each flower pot, and chasing away pigeons whose beating wings cut through the mist.

At the foot of a fountain in a cobbled alley, a sign among flowers and candles: "Je Suis Krakow", written in French, recalling the jihadist attack perpetrated against the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015.

Sheltered - until now - from the attacks which regularly strike Western Europe, displaying a rate of homicides and personal violence among the lowest in Europe, the Poles were proud of their country felt, also by a growing number of foreign tourists, as an oasis of security.

Police will reveal shortly after that the man killed his parents and sister at their home, before launching his bloody raid.

A massacre on a scale never before seen on the banks of the Vistula.

Sunday afternoon in Saint Anne's Church, Cardinal Grzegorz Rys, Archbishop of Krakow, celebrated a mass. “Death is certain, but the time of death is not certain,” he said. “Who would have thought that a stay in Krakow could end in death on the market square?”

Wielding a semi-automatic rifle, the shooter killed six people and injured around fifteen others, including police officers who finally managed to neutralize him, seriously injuring him.

Met on a street in Krakow, Krzysztof Stepien, 28, was in shock.

"We had heard about different situations like this somewhere in Europe or around the world, and it's always terrifying," he told AFP.

"The fact that this happened here in Krakow is simply incredible for us. It's hard to believe that something like this could have happened here," he continued.

Despite the situation, he tries, with a sign in hand, to convince the rare tourists who venture near the square to take advantage of the tours, organized by the company for which he works, in other districts of Poland's second city.

'Polish Breivik'

Veronika Filar, 27, is also “absolutely devastated” by the shooting.

“Our city will never be the same again after what happened yesterday,” she told AFP. And to remember having recently invited his friends to visit Krakow, praising the city as “one of the safest places in the world”.

“I definitely didn’t expect something like this to happen to us.”

She is, however, "very proud" of the behavior of the Poles in the face of this unprecedented tragedy: "society is united and we are very strong together because of what happened."

Millions of zlotys were immediately raised during money collections launched to help the police officers who are considered “heroes” for having neutralized the attacker despite their injuries.

In blood donation centers, you have to wait several hours before being received, as the queues are so long, according to television images.

This terrorist attack was also "an attack against Poland, against our way of life", wrote the daily Rzeczpospolita (center) on Sunday.

An attack on “this value to which we held so dear, namely this feeling of security, illusory – as it turns out –, which we cherished”, wrote the editorialist Boguslaw Chrabota.

And to accuse Polish politicians of playing the card of dividing society in a Poland with a particularly troubled political landscape, between the center-right government of Donald Tusk and the presidency of nationalist Karol Nawrocki, all this against a backdrop of the rise of the far right.

In the shadow of these divisions “Polish Breiviks grow,” warns Boguslaw Chrabota. An allusion to the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik who killed 77 people in attacks on July 22, 2011.

© 2026 AFP

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