Police under fire over their handling of tragic shooting at Prague Faculty of Arts

There is continuing controversy over the performance of the police in the tragic shooting at the Prague Faculty of Arts last December. Zdeněk Kalvach, a security adviser at Charles University, on Friday rejected police claims that the camera system in the faculty building was outdated and that it would have taken several hours to access the footage. He said police officers could have viewed the footage on the spot within an hour, but did not do so and left to check another site in the city centre where the student who committed the crime was due to attend a class. In reality, the police arrived at the faculty’s main building just one minute after the culprit, who did not start shooting until an hour and a half later. Critics and the families of those killed argue that the police could have prevented the bloodbath, if they had been more thorough. Fourteen people were killed and 25 injured in the shooting.