Disturbing new CCTV footage has emerged from the horrific school shooting in Kahramanmaraş, southern Turkey, showing the exact moment 14-year-old Isa Aras Mersinli charged toward the school entrance while terrified students began to realize the danger and desperately tried to escape.

The video, captured on Wednesday at a middle school, shows the boy approaching the gate with a backpack believed to contain five firearms and seven magazines stolen from his retired police officer father. In the tense seconds that followed, several students spotted him and reacted with immediate panic — some froze in fear while others turned and ran, scrambling to get away from the approaching threat.

Moments later, Mersinli opened fire indiscriminately on two separate classrooms, killing eight children aged 10 and 11 and one 55-year-old female teacher. At least 20 others were wounded, with six reported in critical condition. The shooter himself died during the incident.

This attack came just one day after another school shooting in southeastern Turkey, where a former student injured 16 people with a pump-action shotgun. The back-to-back tragedies have left the nation in mourning and sparked urgent calls for better school security and mental health support.

Earlier footage from inside a classroom, filmed by a fellow student, had already gone viral. It showed Mersinli pacing the room while deliberately forming a gun shape with his hands under his chin — a chilling warning sign that now haunts survivors and the public alike. One student recalled the shooter telling a friend, “I will kill you,” before the rampage began.

Survivors described scenes of pure chaos: children screaming, hiding under desks, and jumping from second-storey windows into the arms of classmates waiting below to escape the gunfire. The victims have been named locally as Mustafa Aslan, Şuranur Sevgi Kazıcı, Zeynep Kılınç, Furkan Sancak Balal (11), Bayram Nabi Şişik (10), Belinay Nur Poyraz (10), Adnan Göktürk Yeşil (11), Kerem Erdem Güngör, and teacher Ayla Kara (55).

Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi described the attack as “personal” rather than terrorism-related. Police detained the shooter’s father for questioning and issued arrest warrants for 83 individuals accused of posting content online that glorified the crime or disturbed public order. Investigators are analyzing digital devices seized from the boy’s home and his father’s vehicle. Reports indicate the shooter’s WhatsApp profile featured an image referencing Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings in the United States.

Despite Turkey’s strict gun laws requiring licenses, registration, background checks, and mental health evaluations, the weapons belonged to a former police officer, raising serious questions about how a teenager gained such easy access.

Schools in Kahramanmaraş were closed on Thursday and Friday following the tragedy. Funerals for the victims were held on Thursday amid heavy emotion, while teachers’ unions in Ankara called for a two-day strike with banners reading “We will not surrender our schools to violence.”

The haunting CCTV of the shooter charging toward the gate, combined with the earlier classroom gun-sign video, has become a grim symbol of the tragedy. Witnesses and officials continue to piece together the motive, while communities demand stronger security measures, better mental health support for students, and stricter oversight of firearms — even in law enforcement households.

This latest massacre serves as a painful reminder that no school should ever become a battlefield — and that warning signs, however subtle, must never be ignored. The young victims were lives full of promise, cut short in a moment of unimaginable horror that no parent or teacher should ever have to face.

As Turkey grapples with the shock of two school shootings in 24 hours, the raw footage of students fleeing in terror stands as a heartbreaking call for change. Their names and faces are now etched into the nation’s memory, urging everyone to ensure such a nightmare never happens again.