Wednesday 21 November 2007


The YouTube killer: eight die in schoolroom shooting massacre

The chilling home-made video shows a young man staring out of a blood-red screen, pointing a gun and declaring: “I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit.”
Hours after posting his “massacre manifesto” on the YouTube website, a gunman presumed to be Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, walked into Jokela High School in southern Finland and shot dead five boys, two girls and the headmistress with a .22 calibre handgun. About a dozen more were wounded.
The shooting marked the arrival in peaceful small-town Finland of US-style high-school massacres, a phenomenon spurred by the internet and the isolation of a troubled teenager.

As he posed online with his murder weapon, the killer struck an eerie echo of Cho Seung Hui, who made recordings of himself that he posted to the NBC American television network before killing 32 students at Virginia Tech university, in Blacksburg, last April.
As Finnish police surrounded the school buildings in the town of Tuusula yesterday, students leapt to safety from windows and the killer turned the gun on himself. He was taken to hospital with critical head wounds where he died last night.


The YouTube video continued with images of a young man practising with a firearm in forests similar to those that surround the 5,300-strong community of Tuusula, 30 miles north of the capital Helsinki. The screen then coloured red and the gunman was shown pointing his weapon at the camera, recalling the images recorded by Cho before the Virginia Tech killings.
The first shots rang out at Jokela High at around midday. Mr Kiuru said that the headmistress made an appeal over the public address system for all students to stay in their classrooms.
Report from Timesonline.co.uk

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