Poland’s left-leaning Tusk government and international media labeled Kraków gunman Michał Oksiński far-right, but prosecutors found no evidence of a right-wing affiliation, while images circulating on X from deleted Facebook accounts attributed to him appear to show him posing with an LGBT Pride flag and mocking the pope.
On Nov. 7, Michał Oksiński, 24, drove a Subaru onto Kraków’s Main Market Square and opened fire at random, killing six people and wounding 15. Police officers Jakub Kulik and Artur Morański chased him from the square, and both were shot in the exchange of fire. Kulik, hit three times, approached the gunman, fired, and stopped him, then applied a tourniquet to his own arm. The dead included an Austrian woman and a British man. It was Poland’s deadliest shooting since the fall of communism in 1989.
Before driving to Kraków, Oksiński shot his father Janusz, 53, his mother Renata, 52, and his sister Magdalena, 21, a painting student at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, in the family flat in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, according to investigators. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek said Oksiński faced a separate murder charge over those killings, bringing the total number killed to nine. Investigators found two AR-15 rifles, two pistols and several hundred rounds of ammunition in his car and on his person. In all, they seized 11 firearms. Oksiński died in hospital on Nov. 9 after three operations.
Hours after the attack, Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński, a member of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition, told a press conference in Kraków that “everything indicates” the gunman was fascinated by far-right ideologies and held “very, very radical” views. He also described the gunman as holding “ultranationalistic” views, while saying the claim still had to be verified. Tusk attended the briefing and called the shooting an act of terrorism.