The gunman who shot dead 14 and injured 25 others in a shooting at a Prague university is suspected of murdering a father and a newborn baby in a forest last week.

Police believe David Kozak, a 24-year-old student, shot the 32-year-old man and his two-month-old daughter dead in woodland near the Czech capital on Dec 15 in a chilling dry run.

Their bodies were found after shots rang out at woodland in Klanovice, 11 miles east of Prague’s city centre, last Friday in an apparently random attack.

No perpetrator was found despite hundreds of policemen, dogs and a thermal imaging-equipped helicopter combing the area in the week since.

But after a search of Kozak’s house, Czech police said they found evidence linking him to the double murder.

“We are working very seriously with the version, which is very real at the moment, that today’s attacker is also responsible for the two victims killed last Friday at Klanovice forest,” police chief Martin Vondrasek said on Thursday evening.

“I am convinced at this point that these were completely randomly selected victims by a person with no criminal record whatsoever.”

On Thursday afternoon, the gunman is understood to have first killed his own father in their family home in a village near the town of Kladno, outside of Prague, a police chief spokesman said.

He then went on the shooting rampage at Charles University.

Authorities are investigating messages posted on Telegram under the name of David Kozak.

One post shared the day before the shooting said: “This will be my diary as I go toward school shooting.”

Another message said: “I always wanted to kill. I thought I would be a maniac in the future.”

The police are understood to have been on the scene when the shooting began, having had information that an attack on the school was imminent.

Ondrej Moravcik, a spokesman for the Czech police, said they began evacuating one of the buildings, and then got information that the assailant was in a different building and quickly moved there to start evacuating people.

The authorities said they did not believe that the gunman’s actions were connected to international or domestic terrorism.