Levice student accused of threatening to kill classmates in Slovakia

In the Slovak town of Levice, police have launched criminal proceedings against a 15-year-old vocational school student who threatened to kill his classmates. The teenager spent a night in a police cell but was released the next day. As a result, some parents have stopped sending their children to school, TV Markíza reports.

What classmates say

According to students, the first-year in the electrical engineering program had been behaving strangely for a long time. Last week, during practical training, his threats escalated sharply, classmates claim.

“It started with him saying that when he came to school he would kill me first, and then he moved on to others. He said he had a list with the names of people he would kill and people he wouldn’t,” said a student named Matúš.

The threats, he says, were not limited to classmates. The teenager allegedly also talked about killing Roma and Jews. On Monday at lunch, he reportedly gestured to one student that he would slit his throat with a knife.

What he searched for online also worried the other students. “He sat on Google, phone in hand, looking for weapons. Pictures of weapons,” Matúš noted.

How the school and police responded

The classmates told their homeroom teacher everything. Psychologists came to the school, and then the police got involved: the teenager was placed in a cell but released the very next day.

“Police in Levice have launched criminal proceedings for dangerous threats against a 15-year-old minor,” said Tomáš Havetta, a spokesman for the regional police directorate in Nitra. No formal charges have been brought against the teenager yet. Regional investigators have taken over the case, but police are not disclosing details in the interest of the investigation.

Parents are anxious, school assures safety

The teenager’s release frightened some parents. “I’m terrified. It’s very hard for all of us, because the boy walked out of his cell, he’s free and he could show up here,” said Matúš’s mother, Andrea. Some parents are keeping their children at home for now.

The principal of the Secondary Industrial School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Levice said the student is not at the school. “The school is safe, and the school support team is working with students. It is available to both teachers and parents. Since the moment we learned what had happened, we have been dealing with this issue,” she assured. School management also discussed the situation at an extraordinary parents’ meeting.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz