At least three teenage students were killed and five others wounded on Monday in a rare school shooting in the central Philippines, police said.
The two alleged shooters, aged 15 and 14, had fired “randomly” inside the school, Police Lieutenant Evalyn Diaz told AFP of the incident, which took place at around 9 am (0100 GMT) at San Jose National High School in Leyte province’s Tacloban City.
A video widely circulated by local media, verified by AFP, showed panicked children screaming and crying while hiding inside a classroom amid the sound of gunfire.
“We are hearing bullying was the motive behind their actions, but we have yet to ask them,” she said of the ongoing questioning of the boys arrested in the shooting's aftermath.
“We’re still getting the guns, checking where they got those and how they were able to bring that inside the school,” the police officer said.
“We also have yet to establish the sequence of events,” she added. “They are still in the police station undergoing questioning in the presence of their parents because they are minors.”
There was no immediate update on the status of the five wounded students.
“The victims were immediately transported to nearby medical facilities for treatment and appropriate medical intervention,” regional police said earlier.
The Philippine Department of Education issued a statement calling it a “high-alert situation”.
“Our Central Office officials, alongside regional and division office personnel, are active on the ground, coordinating closely with school authorities and law enforcement to secure the premises,” it said.
While school shootings are a rarity in the Philippines, targeted gun violence is a fixture of provincial politics.
In 2022, three people, including a former city mayor, were killed in a shooting incident before a graduation ceremony at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippine capital.
It was later determined to have been an assassination driven by “personal motives”.
Legal gun ownership is tightly regulated in the Southeast Asian country, but a large black market exists for firearms.
