A 15-year-old student opened fire outside a secondary school in Turgutlu, a district in the western Turkish province of Manisa, on Tuesday morning, wounding eleven fellow students — two of them critically. The attack took place at around 8:00 a.m. local time as pupils were arriving at the Inci Özmez Anatolian Vocational and Technical High School, located roughly 50 kilometres east of the coastal city of Izmir. The suspect, who was a student at the school, did not enter the building. After firing on a group of students in the street outside, he fled the scene with the weapon still in hand and was quickly apprehended by police.

CCTV footage showed the suspect walking calmly through empty streets before the attack, visibly checking a shotgun, dressed casually and appearing unhurried. Subsequent footage captured him running from the scene. Turkey's Justice Minister Akin Gürlek confirmed the arrest and announced that the suspect's mother, father, and grandfather had also been detained. Investigators are examining how the minor obtained the weapon, how it was stored, and what parental supervision was in place. Allegations that the suspect had been bullied prior to the incident are also being looked into. Under Turkish law, the minor must appear before a court before being formally arrested.

Turkey's Interior Minister and Education Minister both travelled to Manisa to oversee the investigation, according to Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz. The Education Ministry said the incident had "deeply saddened our nation, and our educational community in particular" and dispatched three national inspectors to the province.

The shooting is the third of its kind at a Turkish school this year, and comes just one day after the Interior and Education Ministries signed a new security protocol that includes the permanent deployment of police officers at schools deemed highest-risk, heightened surveillance of suspicious persons and vehicles near school premises, and measures to curb the glorification of violence on social media. The new measures had themselves been prompted by two deadly school shootings in April that caused widespread public outrage — including one in Kahramanmaraş, a city in southern Turkey, where a 14-year-old killed nine students aged between 10 and 11 and one teacher before dying at the scene.

Before this year, Turkey had no significant history of school shootings. The rapid succession of incidents has forced authorities into an urgent rethink of school security, raising difficult questions about gun storage in private homes and the safeguarding of young people. The motive behind Tuesday's attack remains unclear.