Washington, Sept. 14: A 25-year-old gunman of Indian descent has stunned Canada by walking into a college in Montreal and engaging in a shooting spree killing one woman and injuring 19 people. The gunman was shot to death.

Police will officially confirm the identity of Kimveer Gill, a resident of Laval, a suburb of Montreal, as the lone gunman only after an autopsy under the laws in the French-speaking province of Quebec.

But leaks and follow-ups by the media in Montreal have revealed considerable details about Gill, who appears to be mentally unstable.

The dead woman is Anastasia DeSousa, 18. Although she has a Goan or Mangalorean-sounding name, sources in Montreal said she is of Cuban descent.

Gill’s target was Dawson College in the centre of Montreal. It is a college with about 10,000 students and is popular among Quebec’s French speakers who want to learn the English language.

It has many students of Indian origin, but the police are yet to release the names of the injured.

Tarek Razek, trauma director of the Montreal General Hospital, where the injured are being treated, said six of the patients are in critical condition, two of them extremely critical in the intensive care unit.

Much of the information about Gill, who was born in Montreal, has so far come from his online blog, www.vampirefreaks.com, where he had already created a tombstone in his name before going on the shooting spree.

The tombstone with his name on it was eerily prophetic. It carried an epitaph: “Lived fast, died young. Left a mangled corpse.”

Yesterday afternoon, Gill, clad in a black trenchcoat and black boots, parked his car near Dawson College and began randomly shooting as he entered the college premises and later its cafeteria. Witnesses said Gill’s hair was cut in the punk Mohawk style, close-cropped on the sides.

A girl cries while fleeing the scene of the shooting. (Reuters)

Gill’s blog has some 50-odd photos of him in various poses holding guns, including a semi-automatic rifle which he is assumed to have used in the shooting spree.

In most of the photos, Gill wore a long black trenchcoat and combat boots. On the blog, he called himself “Trench”, ostensibly because of his love for the black trenchcoat in which he met his gory end.

In one entry, Gill writes about himself in the third person: “His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death.”

Some entries are revealing. “He is not a people person. He has met a handfull (sic) of people in his life who are decent.” He found the vast majority of people he met to be “worthless, no good, kniving, betraying leiing (sic), deceptive.”

His last entry, a few hours before his death, praises the goodness of drinking whisky in the morning. His dislikes are topped by: “The world and everything in it.”

How did he want to die? “Like Romeo and Juliet, or in a hail of gunfire.”