A 14-year-old student opened fire at a school in southern Turkey on Wednesday, killing eight students and a teacher and wounding 13 others.
This is the second school shooting in the country in two days and the deadliest in recent memory.
The attacker, an eighth-grader at Ayser Calik Secondary School in the Kahramanmaras area, entered the building carrying five guns and seven magazines and reached two fifth-grade classrooms before being killed, officials said.
Local governor Mukerrem Unluer said the weapons were believed to belong to the student's father, a former police officer, and both parents were detained.
Six of the 13 wounded were in intensive care, three of them in critical condition.
Interior minister Mustafa Ciftci said the government did not consider the shooting a terrorist attack but an "individual incident", adding that authorities "will take necessary precautions" without providing details.
Video footage showed students jumping from first-floor windows and running from the premises.
Witnesses described scenes of panic as the attack unfolded. "The sound of gunfire was very intense," a reporter for Turkish broadcaster NTV said.
Tearful parents gathered outside as news broke, with one father, Omer Erdag, telling AFP that his child had witnessed the scene. "My child said, 'Dad, my friend got hurt'," he said. "How am I going to bring my kids to this school again?"
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he wished for a "speedy recovery to our children, our families, and our teachers."
The shooting came a day after a former student opened fire at a vocational school elsewhere in southern Turkey, wounding 16 people before killing himself. There were no immediate indications the two attacks were connected, but together they have shaken a country where mass shootings are rare and where educators have spent years warning that violence in schools is on the rise.
Last month, a former student stabbed a teacher to death in a classroom at a vocational high school in the city of Istanbul, injuring another teacher and a student in the same attack.
Educators said the pattern of violence reflected deep structural failures. Kadem Ozbay, chair of educators' union Egitim Is, said the growing sense of insecurity in schools stemmed from poverty, high rates of gun ownership, and government policies he argued undervalued teachers and education.
"When a parent sends his child to school, he trusts only in the school," he told New York Times. "But people don't have safety anymore in schools." Another union official said one of its members had taught the Wednesday attacker, describing him as "very reserved, speaking to no one, asocial".
Unions have called on the government to deploy more security guards, school nurses and counsellors to identify and support troubled students before violence occurs.
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