A Gunman Drove Onto Kraków’s Main Market Square and Fired at Random. Five People Are Dead.

A man drove onto Kraków’s Main Market Square a little after 3 p.m. on Saturday and fired at random people from his car, Kraków police said, and five people are dead. About a dozen more were wounded, police officers among them.

That is where the agreement ends. Police described one attacker, then, in the Polish press, two. English-language roundups say officers are not looking for anyone else. One Polish broadcaster has put an age and a rifle type on the suspect that no official has confirmed. So here is the sorting: every row below comes from statements that police and officials made and that outlets quoted, laid side by side, with the single-source claims marked as such.

Two lines in that table should stop you from repeating the version of this story already circulating. One is the number of attackers. The other is the street.

The Detail That Does Not Fit

Kraków police told RMF24 the suspect was shot at the corner of Stradomska and Dietla streets, on the edge of the Old Town. That is not the square. A car that fired into the square was somewhere else when officers stopped it, and police were telling people still on the square that they were safe, which suggests the shooting there had already ended.

Now count the attackers. Police first spoke of one man. RMF24 says officers’ preliminary information pointed to two perpetrators and does not say whether the second was caught. Other outlets quote police saying they are not seeking anyone else. Those accounts cannot all be current, and nobody has said which one is.

What You Can Safely Repeat

Five dead. About a dozen wounded. A man who drove onto the square and fired at random, who was shot by officers and detained, and whose identity police said they did not know. Add the long military-type firearm, and the large number of other weapons and ammunition that police say were in the car. That is the confirmed account.

The age of 25, the AR-15, the black Subaru and the second attacker each rest on one outlet or one early briefing. Repeat them as unconfirmed or leave them out.

The same goes for the word terrorism. The Ukrainian outlet UNN headlined a “terrorist attack”, but the police statements it quotes never use the word, and neither does Tusk, who wrote that he was being kept informed by the interior minister while police examined the background. A label is not a finding. And if a clip in your feed says two dead and ten injured, that is the early count: the web address of TVP World’s own story still reads “two reported dead, 10 injured,” though the headline now says five.

Where We Stand

We are not going to guess at a motive tonight, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What the confirmed facts support is narrower. A car carrying a long gun, a large number of other weapons and ammunition, and a driver in military-style clothing is a planned event, whatever the plan turns out to have been. That is our read, not police’s, and police have said nothing about planning.

It also points at the questions Polish authorities owe the public once the scene is cleared: how the car got onto the square, why the man was stopped on Dietla Street and not on the square, whether there was a second attacker, and how that much weaponry ended up in one vehicle. We think Poland should publish a minute-by-minute timeline of the afternoon as soon as investigators can, because the gaps in a timeline are where rumor lives.

Questions Still Open