Krakow gunman's skill looked military-grade, his own shooting club says

The 24-year-old who killed six people in central Krakow on Saturday moved like someone trained for combat, not for a weekend range, according to his own sports shooting club. Adam Chyb, 55, a long-time member and spokesperson for the Swit Starachowice club, told Reuters the gunman's technique was on another level entirely. The club sits about 175 km (109 miles) northeast of Krakow.

Chyb was blunt about the gap between sport shooting and what he saw. He said shooting while running, or steering a car with one hand while firing an AR-style gun with the other, belongs to a different category of skill. He described the recoil and blast inside a small metal space like a car as something he could not handle himself, and said it is the kind of thing militaries and police train for. The club, he insisted, has nothing to do with that world.

The shooter came from Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, a town of just under 60,000 in southeastern Poland, and has not been officially named. Chyb said he joined Swit Starachowice in 2022 and turned up only a handful of times, including twice this year, always alongside his father, a long-time member. In the club's eyes he left no warning signs: no military uniform, no behaviour that stood out.

The attack has rattled a country where many have long felt safer than in neighbouring western European states that have seen similar violence. The government said the assailant may have been driven by far-right ideology, without giving details, and nationalist opposition politicians pushed back on that claim, according to Reuters.

The bloodshed stretched beyond Krakow. The bodies of the gunman's father, mother and sister were found at the family home on Saturday, and officials say the same assailant was likely responsible. Authorities have said the family, the gunman included, held licences for 11 firearms in total.

Gun ownership remains comparatively low in Poland next to its European allies, but it has been climbing since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That trend now sits in the background as investigators work out how a club member with a thin attendance record ended up carrying out the country's first mass shooting of this kind.