YouTube massacre: Schoolboy gunman posts threat on the internet then kills eight

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A teenager ran amok in his school yesterday, killing seven fellow pupils and the headmistress hours after posting a chilling prediction of the massacre on the internet.

As more than a dozen other pupils were treated in hospital for gunshot wounds, witnesses said the 18-year-old gunman had clinically walked from classroom to classroom at Joleka High School in southern Finland, selecting his victims before shooting them.

Terrified pupils jumped for their lives from windows before the killer shouted: "This is the start of the revolution" and shot himself in the head.

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The gunman in the YouTube posting he updated hours before the killings

The video shows a photo of Jokela High School which fragments to reveal a red-tinted photo of a man pointing a gun at the camera

He died in hospital last night.

The gunman, named by Finnish newspapers as Pekka-Eric Auvinen, had updated his posting on the YouTube video site only hours before the massacre, warning that he planned to "eliminate all who I see unfit".

Wearing a black T-shirt proclaiming "Humanity is Overrated", the short-haired teenager is seen brandishing a handgun at the camera.

He says his weapon of choice will be a semi-automatic .22 pistol and that his targets are "students and faculty, society, humanity, human race."

He adds: "I am the law, judge and executioner. There is no higher authority than me."

The murders happened in Tuusula, a small town 40 miles from the Finnish capital Helsinki.

Teacher Kim Kiuru said the first he knew of the incident was when the headmistress announced over the public address system just before noon (10am GMT) that all students should remain in their classrooms.

"I stayed in the corridor to listen for more instructions, having locked my classroom door," he said.

"I saw the youth running with a gun in his hand through the doors toward me.

See one of the YouTube videos posted on the account here:

"It felt unreal, a pupil I have taught myself was running towards me, screaming, a pistol in his hand.

"He was moving systematically through the school hallways, knocking on the doors and shooting through the doors.

"I escaped to the corridor downstairs and ran in the opposite direction.

"Then my pupils shouted at me out of the windows to ask what they should do and I told them to jump out of the windows. All my pupils were saved."

Several times the gunman stopped to reload his pistol. Witnesses told how he fired clutching the gun in both hands and raising it in front of his face.

As police marksmen surrounded the school its pupils, aged from 12 to 18, were evacuated to safety.

Although Finland has the world's third-largest per capita handgun ownership, violent incidents are rare at the country's schools. Previous school confrontations have involved knives at worst and no one has died.

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Shocked pupils are escorted from the school to safety

Pekka-Eric Auvinen pictured on his YouTube posting

Police chief Matti Tohkanen said the gunman had obtained a licence for his pistol on October 19 and had no criminal record.

"He was from an ordinary family," he added.

Tuusula mayor Hannu Joensivu said: "This is a peaceful place, nothing like this has happened in the past and nothing like this is to be expected either."

Friends claimed he was not odd although had been acting strangely in the last few days.

Tuomas Hulkkonen, who claimed to know the student well, said: "He withdrew into his shell. I had noticed a change in him just recently, and I thought that perhaps he was a bit depressed or something, but I couldn't imagine that in reality he would do anything like this."

One theory was that the killer had been "inspired" by the 1999 Columbine school massacre in the United States in which 12 pupils and a teacher died.

Songs by the band KMFDM, including Stray Bullet, were found on the website of one of the student killers, Eric Harris, and the same track was on Auvinen's web posting.

It emerged that he was an admirer of Stalin and Hitler.

His former girlfriend, who recently finished with him, denied she had pushed him over the edge.

The 20 year-old said: "He was my boyfriend. I have received many emails and phone calls claiming it is my fault and that I am a murderer because I rejected him.

"But many people are rejected without going out and murdering.

"He did what he did because he was the person he was."

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Emergency services ferry the injured away from the school

Armed police arrive in an attempt to contain the gunman

 

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