A 19-year-old attacks a vocational school in Ostrołęka with a machete and a homemade charge

Ten people were injured on Wednesday in a knife attack at a vocational school in Ostrołęka, in north-eastern Poland. Masovian regional governor Mariusz Frankowski said nine of them were taken to hospital and that none was in a life-threatening condition. The tenth injured person was the attacker, a 19-year-old student who harmed himself.

Frankowski's count was five students, two teachers, two bystanders, and the perpetrator. Police said he used a machete. The attack began around 0900 GMT, just after 11am local time, at Zespół Szkół Zawodowych nr 4, a vocational complex. Polish prosecutors later said the suspect was a student in a matura class, the final year before the school-leaving exam.

Classrooms barred from the inside

Fire brigade spokesperson Adrian Stupski told TVP Info that students barricaded themselves in classrooms before they were evacuated. That detail fixes the sequence more tightly than the arrest photographs. The attack was inside the building long enough for pupils to lock doors, and short enough that the suspect was still on foot when police closed in.

Police said they detained him about 20 minutes after the attack. A photograph posted on X showed a man lying face down in a wooded area. Town hall accounts and the Polish press placed the arrest near the municipal beach, about 400 to 500 metres from the school. The suspect has been identified in Polish reporting as Jakub Z., the form used before a full name is released in a criminal case.

Two of the wounded, both women, arrived at the hospital in Łomża at about 1pm and went straight to the emergency department, the hospital said. Other injured people were taken to hospitals in Ostrołęka. An air ambulance helicopter was also used. Town hall spokesperson Katarzyna Ogniewska said all schools in Ostrołęka were closed and that the children were safe.

A charge that nearly went off

The weapon was not the only object in the bag. National prosecutor Dariusz Korneluk told TVN24 that bomb disposal experts found a homemade explosive device in the attacker's backpack, and that it nearly detonated. Police had already called bomb disposal to the scene. That finding moves the case out of the category of a spontaneous fight. Prosecutors have not said in public whether the device was meant for the school, for the pursuit, or for somewhere else.

Frankowski's statement that no one was in a life-threatening condition was the official medical picture on Wednesday afternoon. It does not settle the criminal picture. A machete attack on students and teachers, followed by a near-detonation in a school bag, will be charged on the intent investigators can prove, not on the luck of the injuries.

A town that shut its schools

Ostrołęka is a river town on the Narew, in the Masovian voivodeship, well north of Warsaw. Closing every school in the town for the rest of the day was a local decision, not a national order. It tells parents the incident was being treated as a site that might still hold a second device, which matches the prosecutor's account of the backpack.

Poland has had other school attacks in recent years, and each one has restarted an argument about security checks at the gate. Wednesday's case adds a specific fact to that argument: the suspect was a student of the school, already inside the daily routine, and the object that most worried prosecutors was not the blade he used but the charge he carried. The governor's list of the wounded, five pupils, two teachers, two passers-by, and the attacker himself, is the count the town will have to live with until the hospitals revise it.