Gunman Kills 10 in Attack at a School in Finland

KAUHAJOKI, Finland (AP) — A gunman whose violent YouTube postings prompted the police to question him a day earlier opened fire on Tuesday at his trade school in western Finland, killing 10 people before shooting himself.

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The New York Times

The gunman was a student in Kauhajoki, the police said.

It was Finland’s second school massacre in less than a year.

Witnesses said panic broke out as the masked gunman entered the school, the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality, and started firing in a classroom where students were taking an exam. He was dressed in black and carried a large bag, witnesses said. About 150 students were at the school, 180 miles northwest of Helsinki, at the time of the shooting.

A police spokesman, Jari Neulaniemi, said the attacker walked into the school armed with a .22-caliber pistol and some kind of explosive devices that he used to start a fire. Some of the dead were burned beyond recognition, Mr. Neulaniemi said. The gunman also wounded two people, the police said.

“I heard several dozen rounds of shots; in other words, it was an automatic pistol,” Jukka Forsberg, the school janitor, told the Finnish broadcasting company YLE. “I saw some female students who were wailing and moaning, and one managed to escape out the back door.”

YLE said the police had identified the gunman as Matti Juhani Saari, a 22-year-old student at the school.

The police had questioned the gunman on Monday about YouTube postings in which he was seen firing a handgun, but he was released because there was no legal reason to hold him, Interior Minister Anne Holmlund said.

Last November, another gunman killed eight people and himself at a school in southern Finland, an attack that set off a fierce debate about gun laws in Finland, which has a deep-rooted tradition of hunting. The government said at the time that it would raise the minimum age for buying guns to 18 from 15, but it has not done so. It insisted that there was no need for broader changes to Finland’s gun laws.

With a population of 5.2 million people, Finland has 1.6 million firearms, making it an anomaly in Europe. It lags behind only the United States and Yemen in civilian gun ownership per capita, studies have shown.

From NYT