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Pictures posted on the Internet show the high school student who carried out the attack and one of his pistols. (AFP) |
Tuusula (Finland), Nov. 7 (Reuters): Seven children were killed when a fellow pupil opened fire at a school in southern Finland today, hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre there.
The school principal also died. The gunman, who had walked through Jokela High School firing into classroom after classroom, is in hospital after shooting and wounding himself. “Five boys, two girls and one adult woman were killed,” police chief Matti Tohkanen said.
He later identified the woman as the principal of the school in Tuusula municipality, a town of 35,000 some 60 km from Helsinki. The YouTube video, set to a hard-driving song called Stray Bullet, shows a still photo of a low building that appears to be Jokela High School. The photo breaks apart to reveal a red-tinted picture of a man pointing a handgun at the camera.
“He (the gunman) was moving systematically through the school hallways, knocking on the doors and shooting through the doors,” said Kim Kiuru, who was teaching a grade 8 class when the shooting began.
“It felt unreal, a pupil I have taught myself was running towards me, screaming, a pistol in his hand.”
Outside a church community building close by, a mother waited as a Red Cross bus pulled up outside.
She watched children stepping off the bus and burst into tears when, through a window, she spotted her child, unharmed.
The YouTube video, entitled “Jokela High School Massacre — 11/7/2007”, was posted by a user called Sturmgeist89. “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,” read a posting by a user of the same name.
“I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.” “Sturmgeist” means storm spirit in German.