<div><span style="font-size: 1rem;">A former police officer armed with a gun and a knife stormed a nursery in northeast Thailand on Thursday, shooting dead at least 34 people including children before killing himself and his family, police said.</span><br></div><div><br></div><div>The attacker, armed with a shotgun, a pistol and a knife, opened fire on the childcare centre in Nong Bua Lam Phu province at about 12:30pm, local time, before fleeing the scene in a vehicle, the force said.</div><div><br></div><div>"The death toll from the shooting incident... is at least 30 people," Anucha Burapachaisri, a spokesman for the Thai prime minister's office, said.</div><div><br></div><div>Police colonel Jakkapat Vijitraithaya, from the province where the attack happened, identified the gunman as Panya Khamrab, a police lieutenant colonel he said was dismissed from the force last year for drug use.</div><div><br></div><div>Jakkapat said there were 23 children among the dead, aged two to three years old.</div><div><br></div><div>The mass killing comes less than a month after a serving army officer shot dead two colleagues at a military training base in the capital Bangkok.</div><div><br></div><div>While Thailand has high rates of gun ownership, mass shootings are extremely rare.</div><div><br></div><div>But in the past year, there have been at least two other cases of shooting murders by serving soldiers, according to the Bangkok Post.</div><div><br></div><div>And in 2020, in one of the kingdom's deadliest incidents in recent years, a soldier gunned down 29 people in a 17-hour rampage and wounded scores more before he was shot dead by commandos.</div><div><br></div><div>That mass shooting was linked to a debt dispute between gunman Sergeant-Major Jakrapanth Thomma and a senior officer, and the military top brass were at pains to portray the killer as a rogue soldier. - Agencies</div><div><br></div><div>bnbd24/fas</div>