The man accused of turning Kraków’s Main Market Square into a shooting gallery will never stand trial. Michał Oksiński, 24, died in hospital on Monday from wounds suffered when police officers brought him down on Saturday afternoon. Prosecutors never got the chance to put any charges to him.
Investigators now have a fuller picture of his final day. Before setting off for Kraków, he is believed to have killed his parents and his sister, aged 21, at their home in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski. At around 3pm he steered his car across the crowded medieval square, firing at random. Four Poles died on the square, along with a 32-year-old visitor from Britain and a woman from Austria aged 51. Around 16 more were hurt, among them officers Jakub Kulik and Artur Morański, who have been praised nationwide for ending the rampage.
What drove him is still unclear. Marcin Kierwiński, who runs the interior ministry, initially pointed to far-right sympathies, a claim Jarosław Kaczyński, head of the opposition PiS party, dismissed as “a blatant lie”. On Monday, prosecution spokesman Przemysław Nowak said there was nothing yet that would allow investigators to say “in a responsible way” that any ideology was behind it. Officers did find a Gadsden flag, the yellow rattlesnake banner, in his room, but Nowak noted it is not widely seen as an extremist emblem.
The terrorism investigation goes on regardless. Waldemar Żurek, Poland’s justice minister, said a Russian hybrid operation could not be excluded, though he refused to share what information he was checking. Senior Kraków prosecutor Eryk Stasielak vowed to chase down “every lead, including the Russian one”.
Oksiński had held a gun licence since January and bought his first weapon in March. Two AR-15 rifles and two pistols were recovered from him and his car, with seven more firearms at home. Police have detained five people for posts glorifying the attack, while flags across Poland flew at half mast for two days.
