ZAMBOANGA CITY — A student carried a pistol and a rifle onto the campus of Ateneo de Zamboanga University on Tuesday and shot dead a fellow student in a classroom before killing himself, police said. The attack killed two people and sent hundreds of students rushing for exits.
Regional police said the shooter was in ninth grade and brought both firearms inside the school compound before opening fire. The victim was a grade 10 student. Police spokeswoman Shella Chang told AFP that investigators are still working to determine a motive. "The investigation is ongoing. We are still trying to identify the motive," Chang said.
Zamboanga City Mayor Khymer Olaso, speaking to a local radio station, said video of the attack shows the shooter first aimed at a teacher seated at a table. "In the video, we see that he first shot at the teacher who was sitting at a table. It seems he missed, then moved to another room. He shot another student there," Olaso said. The mayor initially identified the attacker as a seventh grader, though regional police described him as a ninth-grade student.
A video circulated by local media, apparently live-streamed on Facebook by the shooter, showed the barrel of a gun moving down a school hallway before being pointed into a classroom and fired. Children wearing school uniforms were then seen screaming and running toward an exit. The shooter's Facebook account was disabled after the video spread.
Ateneo de Zamboanga is a Catholic private institution in western Mindanao. The school confirmed both fatalities in a statement and said it had coordinated with parents and guardians to collect their children. "We have already coordinated with parents and guardians to pick up their children and the university has ensured the safety of those remaining on campus," the statement said.
Police said the crime scene was being processed as of Tuesday afternoon. It was not immediately clear how many students, if any, were injured beyond the two fatalities.
Tuesday's attack is the second school shooting in the Philippines in two months. In June, three teenage students were killed and 20 others wounded in a separate shooting in the central Philippines. School shootings remain rare in the country by regional standards, but the back-to-back incidents have drawn national attention.
Ateneo de Zamboanga last month conducted an active shooter drill, making it one of many schools across the country to run such exercises in recent months.
Legal gun ownership in the Philippines is tightly regulated under national law, but authorities acknowledge a large black market for firearms operates throughout the country. How the student obtained the pistol and rifle he brought to campus remains under investigation.
