Nine killed in school shooting in Finland
Brett Young , Reuters
Published: Tuesday, September 23, 2008
HELSINKI - A student 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, local media and authorities said.

The gunman was still alive but wounded and in hospital, authorities said.

"A cold-blooded shooter entered the building with an automatic pistol and started cutting down students," said Jukka Forsberg, a maintenance man at the vocational school in the town of Kauhajoki.


A handout photo shows an aerial view of a vocational school in the southwestern Finnish town of Kauhajoki, where a shooting took place on Tuesday

"He also shot towards me, did not say anything and once the bullets started to whizz by I started running for my life."

Local authorities said students and staff had been evacuated from the school, where a fire broke out but was later extinguished.

"Several are dead," said Kauhajoki Mayor Antti Rantakokko. "The situation is over now."

The school, which calls itself the "Kauhajoki School of Hospitality", had 150 students and 40 teachers as of 2005, according to the official website.

Rescue coordinator Kari Saarinen, who is also chief physician at Seinajoki hospital, about 60 kms (40 miles) from Kauhajoki, said hospitals in the area were on full emergency alert. He said he was unsure about the number of victims, but believed there were several - some wounded, some dead.

The shooting raised the spectre of the killings at Finland's Jokela high school last year, where student Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse and the principal after broadcasting his intent with a video on YouTube.

Auvinen shot himself and died later of his injuries.

"This is very very depressing. We have only had some time since the Jokela case last November," Saarinen said.

Rantakokko said there were echoes of Jokela in the Kauhajoki incident.

"On the Internet there is some information, there are analogies to the Jokela case," he said.

A search of YouTube yielded four videos filmed by a user who calls himself Mr. Saari, who said he was 22 years old and lived in Kauhajoki. The videos, between 20 and 32 seconds long, show a man dressed in black or dark colours, firing a handgun at a shooting range.

The YouTube user's profile included the words: "And suddenly there was war and the mothers they screamed. For revenge and reprisals for another war."

The videos were taken offline soon after the shooting.

Finland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, ranking third after the United States and Yemen, according to a study last year by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

After the last shooting, the Finnish government took some steps to toughen gun regulations. On Tuesday, it held an emergency meeting of governing coalition party leaders.

Kauhajoki is a municipality of 14,000 people located in the province of Western Finland. The Kauhajoki vocational school teaches catering, tourism studies and home economics.

Shootings inside schools or universities


Here are some details of some of the major shootings inside schools and universities around the world in recent years:

March 1996 - BRITAIN - A gunman burst into a primary school in Dunblane in Scotland and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.

March 1997 - YEMEN - A man with an assault rifle attacked hundreds of pupils at two schools in Sanaa, killing six children and two others. He was sentenced to death the next day.

March 1998 - USA - At Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys aged 13 and 11 set off the fire alarm and killed four students and a teacher as they left the school.

May 1998 - USA - In Springfield, Oregon, a student opened fire in Thurston High School, killing two students and injuring 22. The boy's parents were later found slain in their home.

April 1999 - USA - Two student gunmen killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before killing themselves.

June 2001 - JAPAN - Mamoru Takuma, armed with a kitchen knife, entered the Ikeda Elementary School near Osaka and killed eight children. Takuma was executed in September 2004.

Jan. 2002 - USA - A student who had been dismissed from the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, killed the dean, a professor and a student, and wounded three others.

Feb. 2002 - GERMANY - In Freising, in Bavaria, a former student thrown out of trade school shot three people before killing himself. Another teacher was injured.

April 26, 2002 - GERMANY - In Erfurt, eastern Germany, a gunman opened fire after he said he was not going to take a maths test. A total of 18 people died, including the assailant.

Sept. 1, 2004 - RUSSIA - 333 hostages, at least 186 of them children, died in a chaotic storming of School No.1 in Beslan, after it was seized by rebels demanding Chechen independence.

March 21, 2005 - USA - A 16-year-old high school student shot dead five students, a teacher and a security guard at the same school at Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation. He had also killed his grandfather and his grandfather's companion elsewhere on the reservation.

Sept. 13, 2006 - CANADA - Kimveer Gill opened fire at Montreal's Dawson College killing one student and injuring 19. Gill killed himself after a battle with police.

Oct. 2, 2006 - USA - Charles Carl Roberts, a dairy truck driver, attacked a one-room Amish school in rural Pennsylvania, shot ten girls, killing five of them, before killing himself.

April 16, 2007 - USA - Gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 15 at Virginia Tech University in the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.

Nov. 7, 2007 - FINLAND - Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse and the principal and himself with a handgun at the Jokela High School near Helsinki.

Feb. 8, 2008 - USA - A nursing student killed two women and then herself in front of classmates at Louisiana Technical College in the state capital, Baton Rouge.

Feb. 14, 2008 - USA - A man fired into a lecture hall packed with students at Northern Illinois University near Chicago, killing five people and wounding 18 before killing himself.

Sept. 23, 2008 - FINLAND - A student opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland killing nine people and wounding himself.

I like the not-so-subtle gun control bit at the end.

yours was made second, but the other thread inadvertantly boarded a flight for augusta.

bart wins!




in response to thread..


only in america!

http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/Home/ContentPosting?newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20080923%2ffinland_shooting_080923&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&show=False&number=0&showbyline=True&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=True

Finland police questioned suspected gunman Monday

The gunman who unleashed a deadly attack in a school in Finland on Tuesday was questioned by police one day earlier, after he posted a suspicious video on YouTube.



Police have confirmed nine people were killed and there are reports two more were wounded in Tuesday's violence.

Journalist Leo Pugin told CTV Newsnet that the video of the 22-year-old man firing a gun was uploaded on Friday, and police met with him on Monday, but let him go.

"After questioning this man police decided not to do any further measures," Pugin said from the capital, Helsinki.

"There was no direct threats in the video. He was just shooting."

Gun ownership in Finland is among the highest in the world. Pugin said the alleged gunman was a student at the vocational school where the shooting occurred.

The attack began just before 11 a.m. local time in Kauhajoki, about 290 kilometres northwest of Helsinki.

Between 150 and 200 students were in the building at the time.

Earlier Tuesday, police said the suspected shooter had a serious head wound, possibly self-inflicted. There were mixed reports about whether he had been taken to hospital or was in police custody, and what his condition was.

Shortly after the shooting superintendent Jussi Muotio of the Kauhajoki police told The Associated Press that the school had been secured and the incident was over.

The gunman may have been imitating a November, 2007 shooter in Finland. In that incident, an 18-year-old man killed five boys, two girls and the female principal at a high school in Tuusula, about 50 kilometres north of Helsinki.

He then turned the gun on himself and died later in hospital, according to officials.

The 2007 shooter, identified by police as Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who was a student at the school, posted video foreshadowing the attack on the popular video-sharing website

And he failed to kill himself. I mean, isnt Scandinavia supposed to be efficient in suicide and weak in homicide?

Hmmm, your theories intrigue me and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I live in the country responsible for 10% of all world homicides.


Oh well, always a shame of something like that happening.

only in countries with no gun control, like America.

Even worse that they questioned him the day before he shot up the school. He obviously realized they were onto him.

He is dead now.

so he is.

Finnish Shooter Dead

(CNN) -- The suspect in a shooting rampage at a college in Finland that left at least nine dead has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, a hospital official told CNN Tuesday.


Undated image -- posted on the Internet -- of alleged gunman Matti Juhani Saari

The male suspect survived for a while before dying at Tempere University Hospital, medical director Matti Lehto said. He had no family with him.

Meanwhile, Finnish police interviewed and released the suspect a day before Tuesday's bloody carnage, MTV-3 of Finland reported.

The authorities say they became interested in the 22-year-old student after he allegedly posted violent videos on YouTube.

Four videos were posted Monday showing a man -- possibly himself -- firing a pistol at a shooting range.

YouTube took the videos down within hours of the shooting.

MTV-3's Foreign Editor Risto Puolimatka told CNN that the suspect was also issued with a temporary gun license last month. It was the gunman's first license, Puolimatka said.

Officials say the man began firing at around 11 a.m. local time in a classroom at the college in the town of Kauhajoki in southwestern Finland before shooting himself.

Several other people were wounded in the attack, but officials could not immediately say how many. Watch more about the YouTube videos »

Jukka Forsberg, a maintenance worker at the school, said the man was wearing a ski mask and walked into the building with a large bag, the agency said. About 150 students were on campus at the time.

Smoke billowed from a building on campus but officials could not immediately say what caused the fire. Three hours after the shooting, firefighters were still trying to bring a blaze under control, fire official Olle Peauttonen told CNN

Tapio Varmola, who was visiting the school at the time, told CNN he was in a building about two blocks away when the shootings occurred.

"I did not hear anything," he said. "We did not know what happened. It became clear later."

After the shootings, he said, he heard students shouting. Police came about 10 minutes after they were called, Varmola said.

"It took two hours to get this situation ended," he said.

The school taught late teens and young adults, Jarkko Sipila of MTV 3 told CNN. "It's more or less like an agricultural or professional school where people teach how to make food or how to cook in big kitchen, in industrial kitchens," he said.

Kauhajoki, with a population of about 15,000, is about 290km (180 miles) from the capital, Helsinki.

The incident comes almost a year after another school shooting left nine people, including the gunman, dead in the Finnish town of Tuusala.

Before that shooting, the gunman, 18-year-old student Pekka-Eric Auvinen, posted a video on YouTube titled "Jokela High School Massacre 11/7/2007" -- identifying the date and location of the attack.

That is true, for nobody has ever died in countries outside of America. Ever.

Finnish him!

Winner!

But are we talking about violence in general, or school shootings specifically?

Neither, strictly death. People only die in America. In America.

Every man dies...in America. But, not every man truly lives...in America.

Fixed.