“I’m still shaking with terror.” At the faculty, they were training how to deal with a shooter

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At 9:50 a.m., the first staged shots ring out through the Faculty of Science building. Radka Beranová was playing the character of a student at that moment, the shooting caught her in the middle of a lecture on the second floor.

“We heard the sound of gunfire on another floor. Our teacher was holding the door, trying to protect us, we were trying to hide. Then a shooter burst into the classroom,” the extra describes later. In fact, she herself teaches at the Faculty of Health Studies.

Police officers, firefighters and rescuers have been rehearsing an intervention during a shooting at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem since the morning.

“He ran in there, it was very unpleasant, loud bangs, screaming. I’m still shaking with terror,” says – now with a laugh – the extra. Whoever managed to hide, stayed hidden. The others played dead or wounded.

They had no idea how many shooters would come or what would happen when. They were only given the roles of students or teachers and they also knew in advance how they would turn out. Will they lose their lives in the simulation, or will they escape with injuries, for example? “I only had a sprained ankle, so I couldn’t leave, I had to stay in the classroom and wait for help,” says Radka.

There were twelve students and one teacher in the class at the time. The shooter left and the classroom was completely silent. Dead and wounded lay in front, and others hid around the corner. No one spoke.

The first police car brakes in front of the university building minutes after the first shot. More policemen gradually arrive, the Special Order Unit is added, policemen with ballistic shields and long guns rush into the building, in the parking lot paramedics are preparing areas for the treatment of a larger number of wounded.

“Movement around the building is controlled by patrols as they gradually commute. We try to keep the delay as short as possible, basically only for arming with ballistic protection and arming with long weapons. The patrols then communicate with each other and gradually inspect the building,” explains Pavel Holzknecht, head of the riot police.

Meanwhile, the students are counting down the seconds until help arrives. “It seemed like an eternity, but it could have been five to ten minutes. The police were the first to arrive, they ran through the classroom to find out what had happened. Subsequently, they began to collect the wounded, at that moment relief came. Meanwhile, you heard that the attacker was moving somewhere along the corridor and shooting somewhere else,” says “student” Radka.

The police officers checked whether there were no attackers among the extras, sorted them according to the severity of their injuries and took them out of the building. There, those who did not need immediate medical intervention waited on buses for an interventionist to help them manage the situation psychologically. Radka – according to the script with a sprained ankle – was carried outside the building on a stretcher.

The main goal of the exercise called AMOK was to test the cooperation between the individual components of the integrated rescue system.

The task of the police officers was primarily to eliminate the active shooter. However, they did not know in advance how many shooters entered the building or where exactly they were moving. The specific form of intervention depends only on when and where the police find the shooter.

“We have 26 cameras in that facility that will record the entire course of the exercise. It’s hours of footage that we have to evaluate, and based on that, a written evaluation is then made and procedures are adjusted according to possible errors,” says the head of the riot police, Pavel Holzknecht, shortly before the start of the intervention.

After about an hour of intervention, the policemen take the tall man out of the building in handcuffs. Investigators are arresting another near the faculty building. According to these police officers, three people were apparently involved in the fictitious attack.

“Today’s training is designed in such a way that we would like to see it through to the end. This means including on-site procedural actions when the building is cleared: crime scene investigation, standard work and criminal police services and investigations, crisis intervention work. We expect it to last until the afternoon,” adds the head of the riot police.

Check out the photo gallery from the event: