标签： Asia

A horrific mass shooting that began at a private residence and spilled over into a prestigious Bangkok-area secondary school has left at least seven people dead, including the 14-year-old perpetrator, and 22 others injured, Thai national authorities confirmed this week.

According to Thailand’s Minister of Public Health, the teenage shooter first carried out a double homicide at his home, fatally shooting his grandparents before traveling to the Debsirin School Nonthaburi campus, a branch of one of Thailand’s most elite secondary education institutions, located on the northern outskirts of the capital. Once inside the school grounds, the attacker opened fire on faculty and staff, killing five teachers before turning the gun on himself to take his own life.

Of the 22 people wounded in the rampage, nine remain in critical, life-threatening condition as of the latest official update. Local law enforcement was rapidly dispatched to the campus as the active shooting unfolded, with emergency officials issuing urgent public warnings urging nearby residents to avoid the area and instructing people already trapped inside the school building to find secure hiding spots and wait for first responder extraction. At one point during the response, police updated the public via social media that the shooter had been located inside the school’s computer lab.

Founded in central Bangkok in 1885, Debsirin School ranks among the most prestigious secondary learning institutions in Thailand, with a sprawling network of regional branches across the country. Its alumni roster includes many of Thailand’s most prominent public figures, spanning senior diplomats, professional athletes, and multiple former national prime ministers.

Witnesses who managed to escape the campus described chaotic, terrifying scenes as the shooter moved methodically from classroom to classroom. A seventh-grade student who fled the building spoke to the BBC about the moment the attacker reached her classroom, saying he shot the teacher standing just inside the doorway before she could escape and hide, leaving her unable to see further violence unfolding.

Another student survivor told Reuters that he initially mistook the repeated gunfire for common fireworks, or the loud sound of someone banging a heavy object against a wall. “There were many shots: bang bang bang. Then it went quiet. Then it started again,” he recalled of the terrifying incident.

Investigators later confirmed that the 9mm handgun used by the shooter was owned by his grandfather, a retired teacher, confirming the weapon was legally registered to the family member.

Photos from the scene show terrified students and staff fleeing the campus in panic, while those who waited outside for updates on missing peers and loved ones appeared visibly distraught in the aftermath. In response to the violence, all other schools within the immediate vicinity canceled remaining classes for the day and arranged for students to return home early to their families.

Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul released an official statement extending his deepest condolences to the families of all victims of the tragedy. He emphasized that the mass shooting “shouldn’t have happened,” noting that the incident underscores the government’s rationale for strict restrictions on civilian gun ownership. “I don’t just feel sorry for the victims but I feel sorry that this happened. How can this happen in our country,” the prime minister said.

Thailand enforces formal strict gun control legislation on paper, with illegal firearm possession carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment. However, consistent, widespread enforcement of these laws has long been a persistent challenge for national authorities. The country has one of the highest rates of civilian gun ownership in all of Southeast Asia, with independent estimates indicating that nearly 40 percent of all guns held by civilians in Thailand are unregistered and held illegally.

A wave of violent unrest has shaken Sri Lanka’s overcrowded prison system in the past 48 hours, leaving three inmates dead and more than two dozen others injured, the country’s top public security official confirmed to national lawmakers Friday.

Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala told Parliament that the first fatal outbreak erupted at Colombo Magazine Prison, located in the capital, late Thursday. Around 40 inmates broke out of their cells before clashing with one another, leaving one detainee dead. The violence spread the following morning to Kuruwita Prison, a facility roughly 50 miles outside the capital in the town of Kuruwita, where a second clash claimed the lives of two more inmates. Across the two violent incidents, 23 injured detainees were transported to local hospitals for emergency care, Wijepala added. According to the minister, the fighting was tied to long-running power conflicts between rival criminal gangs and narcotics trafficking networks operating within the prison system. Prison administration spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment on the incidents.

Separately, at a third detention center, the Pallansena Correctional Center, prison authorities deployed tear gas Friday to disperse a peaceful inmate protest. No injuries or casualties were reported in that unrest.

These latest fatalities come just one month after a far deadlier clash at Negombo Prison on July 6, which left at least 26 people dead, including seven serving prison officers. Experts and prison rights advocates have long warned that systemic overcrowding has created a tinderbox inside Sri Lanka’s corrections facilities, pointing to structural policy failures that have driven the ongoing crisis.

Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara revealed in a recent parliamentary address that Sri Lanka’s prisons currently hold more than 39,000 inmates across a system designed to hold a maximum of just 10,000 detainees — meaning the national prison population is four times the facility network’s intended capacity. Senaka Perera, president of the Committee for Rights of Prisoners, noted that overcrowding and inadequate living conditions have left detainees in a constant state of frustration, creating fertile ground for repeated outbreaks of violence.

A large share of the current prison population is made up of suspects awaiting trial on narcotics-related charges. Perera explained that recent legislative reforms that tightened national bail requirements have drastically increased the number of pre-trial detainees held behind bars, worsening overcrowding across the country. His rights organization has repeatedly called on national authorities to reclassify drug-dependent inmates as medical patients rather than criminal offenders, and to build dedicated, separate rehabilitation facilities to address the root of the narcotics crisis driving prison unrest.

Along the sun-dappled southwestern Indian coast, in the historic port city of Kochi, two men carry the weight of an ancient community that has outlasted empires, religious persecution, and centuries of change. Today, they stand as the last stewards of Cochin Jewry — a distinct community that has called this region home for millennia, now fading into history as most of its members relocated to Israel decades ago.

At sunset on Shavuot, the Jewish holiday marking the gifting of the Torah to Moses, 70-something Keith Hallegua pulled on his gray kippah and made the quiet, solitary walk down the cobblestone lane of Kochi’s iconic Jew Town to the 458-year-old Paradesi Synagogue. For Hallegua, the last local Jew remaining in the neighborhood, this pilgrimage ended as it often does: praying alone, without the 10-person male quorum called a minyan required for formal Jewish communal worship.

Across the city at the 12th-century Kadavumbagam Synagogue, Elias “Babu” Josephai paused to remember the chukkunda — golden fried dough balls his grandmother once prepared for the Shavuot holiday. “It wasn’t much,” he said, wiping away tears. “But at that time, it was everything.”

The story of Cochin Jews stretches back more than 2,000 years, when the first Jewish traders are believed to have arrived on India’s Malabar Coast during the era of King Solomon. For centuries, the community lived in relative peace alongside Hindu, Muslim, and Christian neighbors, with no recorded history of systemic antisemitism — a rare stability that allowed their traditions to take deep root. In the 1950s, however, the vast majority of the community migrated to the newly formed state of Israel, leaving behind empty homes, silent synagogues, and generations of shared memory. Today, fewer than 5,000 Jews remain across all of India, the world’s most populous nation.

Hallegua and Josephai chose to stay, and each now tends to the legacy of their distinct branches of Cochin Jewry, even as they carry the grief of a community that is disappearing. Hallegua is a Paradesi Jew, descended from fair-skinned Sephardic Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century and established dominance in Kochi’s Jewish community. For centuries, Paradesi Jews enforced rigid internal hierarchies: they brought enslaved people with them to India, and their freed descendants, called Meshuchrarim Jews, were confined to lower social standing and forced to fight for basic religious equality.

Josephai, meanwhile, is a Malabar Jew — part of the darker-skinned community that traces its roots to the earliest Jewish settlements on the Malabar Coast. Like the Meshuchrarim, Malabar Jews faced systemic discrimination from the Paradesi community for generations. While those caste and color-based divisions faded after most Cochin Jews relocated to Israel and abroad, their bitter echoes still linger in the community’s collective memory.

Though the two men rarely cross paths, both share a fierce, unshakable pride in their dual identity as Indians and Jews, and a relentless commitment to preserving what remains of their culture. Josephai spent years single-handedly resurrecting Kadavumbagam Synagogue after it was destroyed by vandals, tucking the restored house of worship behind the small aquarium shop he runs. Today, services are rare, and Josephai is almost always alone when he lights the lamps and leads prayers — a promise he made to his grandmother after his siblings moved to Israel in 1972. When he rebuilt the synagogue, neighbors of every faith stepped forward to help: a Muslim donor gifted the sanctuary lamps, a Christian neighbor gave a hand-carved Ten Commandments plaque, and a Hindu foundation covered the cost of the chandeliers.

An oil lamp burns constantly before the synagogue’s Torah ark, tended daily by Josephai. “Every Jew has a dream that his last breath should be in Israel,” he said. “I believe my last breath should be inside this synagogue.” Now 70, Josephai hopes a Jewish organization will one day take over the synagogue, library, and small museum he has built, acknowledging that once he is gone, no one will remain to carry the stories of his community. “But this is our fate and that’s how it is,” he said. Thapan Dubayehudi, a Malabari Jew who relocated to Vienna in 2022, calls Josephai “a one-man army” for his tireless work preserving Cochin Jewish history.

For Hallegua, staying in Jew Town was originally a matter of family responsibility: he remained to care for his ailing brother and aging parents, never imagining he would one day be the last local member of the Paradesi Synagogue. Today, the iconic 16th-century synagogue draws crowds of tourists every day, and relies on visiting Jewish travelers to form a minyan for rare communal services. On quiet days, when Hallegua walks the empty lanes to the sanctuary, he often questions God about his fate — though he has never received an answer.

His mind is crowded with fading memories: the unique blend of Sephardic chants and South Indian folk melodies that defined Paradesi Jewish worship, the smell of his mother’s famous chili chicken, his grandmother’s frantic pre-Passover cleaning, new clothes for the Rosh Hashanah holiday. “That’s never going to come back,” he said. Though the weight of being the last Jew of Jew Town leaves him broken some days, and he has often considered leaving, he remains rooted to his home. “I was born a Jew in India and I shall die in India, a Jew,” he said.

What makes the story of Cochin Jewish heritage preservation extraordinary is that it is not just the work of the few remaining Jewish community members. Across Jew Town, non-Jewish locals have dedicated themselves to protecting the neighborhood’s history and culture. M.C. Praveen, a Hindu who grew up in Jew Town playing cricket near the Paradesi Synagogue and eating Shabbat dinners with Hallegua’s family, now serves as a synagogue trustee and calls protecting Cochin Jewish history his life’s mission. He works closely with former Cochin Jews and their descendants scattered across the globe to ensure the community’s story is told accurately for future generations. Earlier this year, synagogue leaders opened a new museum showcasing the community’s history, centered on a 1,000-year-old charter etched into two copper plates granted by a local Hindu king that guaranteed the Jewish community full religious freedom — a document that speaks to the long history of tolerance in the region.

Shulamit Kotzer, a synagogue trustee who was born in Jew Town and moved to Israel at age 2, still considers Kochi her home, and dreams of opening a boutique hotel in the neighborhood to connect more visitors to its history. Down the street, Thaha Ibrahim, a Muslim craftsman, carries on the legacy of Sarah Cohen, the late Jewish matriarch who taught him the traditional craft of Cochin Jewish embroidery at her shop on Synagogue Lane. Ibrahim now runs the shop, teaches the craft to his son to carry on the legacy, lights Shabbat candles every Friday, and closes the shop on Saturdays in keeping with Jewish tradition. For Ibrahim, the work is not about religion — it is about human connection, even amid rising interreligious tensions in other parts of the world. “This is not about religion, it’s about human connection,” he said.

Today, the former Jewish homes of Jew Town now house spice warehouses and antique shops, a reminder of the community’s historic role as major players in Kochi’s world-famous spice trade, which for centuries shipped black pepper, cardamom, and nutmeg across the globe. But the legacy of Cochin Jewry endures, held together by two aging stewards and a multi-faith community committed to keeping their story alive.

A deadly shooting incident at a school located on the outer fringes of Thailand’s capital Bangkok has left at least six people dead, according to updated information from law enforcement officials. In the wake of this tragic violence, emergency first response teams have been deployed and are remaining on standby to address any developing circumstances, potential secondary risks, and the urgent needs of survivors and affected community members. Thai law enforcement agencies have not yet released additional detailed information about the suspect, the motive behind the attack, or the identities of the victims, as the initial response and on-site investigation remain ongoing. The incident has sent shockwaves through the local community, which is now grappling with the sudden loss of life and the trauma of a mass shooting at an educational facility, a space meant to be safe for students and staff alike.