Aftermath News: Gunman kills 10 then himself in another Finnish school massacre

A combination photo shows frame grabs of student Matti Juhani Saari (R) who is blamed for a fatal shooting at a vocational school in Kauhajoki September 23, 2008, and student Pekka-Eric Auvinen (L) who opened fire at Jokela High school in southern Finland November 7, 2007. Local officials said Saari shot dead nine people at a school in western Finland on Tuesday before shooting himself, in the country’s second school shooting in less than a year. In an echo of last year’s deadly shooting at Finland’s Jokela high school, Saari posted menacing videos of himself wielding a gun on the Internet in the run-up to the attack. REUTERS/Handout (FINLAND).
Related
Finland school shooter admired Plato, Hitler, Nietzsche
Tuesday’s shooting to reopen the debate over gun ownership in Finland.
AFP | Sep 23, 2008
KAUHAJOKI, Finland (AFP) — A masked student went on the rampage at a Finnish school Tuesday, methodically gunning down 10 people before turning the weapon on himself, a day after police quizzed him over a chilling YouTube warning.
Young women screamed as the 22-year-old shooter stalked the corridors of the vocational college in a ski mask and black outfit letting off round after round at helpless students before starting several fires, witnesses and police said.
The massacre in Kauhajoki in southwestern Finland was the country’s deadliest school shooting and the second in under a year.
“I heard the sound of shooting and hysterical girls’ voices. Then two girls came towards my room and said a weird man was shooting,” Jukka Forsberg, the janitor of the school, told AFP.
“I went to see and saw a guy leaving a big black bag in the corridor and going into classroom number three and closing the door.
“I looked through the window and he immediately shot at me,” he said, adding, “Thank God I was not hit! He fired at me but I was running zigzag. I ran for my life.”
Forsberg said he heard “horrible screams of pain” as he raced out of the building.
The shooter has been identified as a second-year culinary arts student Matti Juhani Saari.
Finnish Interior Minister Anne Holmlund said police had questioned Saari the day before the attack over a video of himself at a shooting range he had posted on the Internet.
Investigators had deemed him not enough of a threat to withdraw his gun license, Holmlund said, adding that he obtained a temporary permit for a .22-caliber weapon earlier this year.
Another video clip on YouTube showed the same young man pointing a gun at the camera and saying “You will die next,” before firing four shots.
Jari Neulaniemi, the head of the police investigation, told the YLE public broadcaster that nine victims had been found in one classroom, while another had been discovered in a corridor.
Saari, who eventually turned the gun on himself, was found with serious head injuries in another corridor at the other end of the building.
He was taken to a local hospital but died later of his wounds, bringing the total death toll to 11, police told AFP.
YouTube said it had removed footage of the Finnish gunman issuing threats in the weeks before the shooting rampage.
“Our heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones in this tragedy,” said a spokesperson for the video-sharing website in Paris.
The shooting started at 11:00 am (0800 GMT) and lasted for about an hour and a half, Ari Paananen, at the Kauhajoki mayor’s office, told AFP.
Hours after the massacre, streets in the sleepy town of around 14,000 people were jammed with fire trucks, police vans and military vehicles.
Police wearing bullet-proof vests patrolled the school grounds and crowds gathered behind police barricades.
The school had been set on fire in several locations around the building, a fire brigade duty officer said, but the blaze had been brought under control.
Thick smoke had however complicated the police investigation, and a forensic team had not been able to begin identifying bodies inside the building until hours after the attack.
“During the night we will try to identify the victims, but some of them have been severely burned so identifying them might take some time,” Tuula Kyren, a spokeswoman for the National Bureau of Investigation told AFP.
One of Saari’s neighbours told tabloid Iltalehti that the shooter had appeared to be a normal, quiet person.
“He was like one of us, quiet, but not a hermit,” said an unnamed young female student.
Following a crisis meeting of the Finnish government, Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen expressed his cabinet’s condolences to the victims and their families and said flags would fly at half mast across Finland on Wednesday.
Coming less than a year after a massacre at a Finnish high school in Jokela, north of Helsinki, Tuesday’s shooting is bound to reopen the debate over gun ownership in Finland.
Finland has one of the world’s highest gun ownership rates, ranking third behind the United States and Yemen, according to a study last year by the Small Arms Survey of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
On November 7, 2007, 18-year-old student Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot six students, the headmistress and a school nurse before killing himself.
Before he went on his deadly rampage, Auvinen had also posted a video on the file-sharing website YouTube.
Since the Auvinen shooting Finland’s cabinet had announced plans to toughen the country’s gun laws but no changes had yet been introduced.