A TEENAGER at a school in Finland shot dead eight people today, having first signalled his intentions in a video posted on YouTube.
Police identified 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen as the killer and said he had died after turning the gun on himself following the massacre at Jokela High School in the small town of Tuusula.
"The gunman aimed his weapon at his head and fired," a police spokesman said.
An 18-year-old student opened fire at his high school at a town in southern Finland today, killing eight people before shooting himself in a rampage that has stunned a nation where gun crime is rare.
The gunman was rushed to a hospital in Helsinki with a gunshot wound to his head after the shooting at Jokela High School in Tuusula, 50 kilometres north of the capital, where he later died.
Police are analysing YouTube postings that appeared to anticipate the massacre, including clips in which a young man calls for revolution and apparently prepares for the attack by test-firing a semi-automatic handgun.
Witnesses described chaos and panic as Auvinen shot dead his female principal , five boys, two girls, and wounded a dozen others as they tried to flee the carnage.
"When we heard the shots we started breaking the windows and jumping," said Franz Andersin, a 14-year-old student.
"I saw injured people lying in the corridor. We started to run and followed (the crowd) in panic."
"Everyone was trying to squeeze through a narrow door," another student, Miro Lukinmaa, told the Iltalehti newspaper.
Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen described the shooting, the worst in the Nordic country's history, as "a great tragedy".
"This is an awful day... The shooting has deeply undermined the sense of security in society... Nobody had expected such things," Vanhanen said.
The rampage, which began at 11.43am local time (2043 AEDT Wednesday) inside a classroom at the secondary school of some 450 pupils, came after Auvinen posted a video entitled "Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007" on the video-sharing website YouTube.
The video, posted sometime in the past two weeks, zooms in on the school with heavy metal music blaring in the background and shows a young man against a red background pointing a gun at the camera.
Within hours of the shooting, the video had been downloaded more than 200,000 times.
In his profile on YouTube, Auvinen, calling himself Sturmgeist89, says: "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause.
"I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection."
"You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want? Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand," he added.
Police and school pupils alike were at a loss to explain why Auvinen had committed such a terrible act.
"He comes from a very normal family, four people, he has one brother. He had no problems in school," said local police officer Jan-Olav Nyholm naming Auvinen for the first time.
Fellow pupil, Andersin told AFP, "I knew him. He was always smiling. I don't understand why he did this".
Another of Auvinen's classmates, meanwhile, told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper that the gunman, who was a sports shooter, had recently been acting "strange" and had begun making drawings of gun massacres.
He had logged into his YouTube account this morning, also posting videos hailing, among others, the perpetrators of school shootings in the United States and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
According to media reports, he had repeatedly expressed admiration for Hitler and Stalin.
The American-style shooting sent shockwaves through Finland, where such violence is extremely rare.
While there have been several of stabbings at Finnish schools in recent years, today's was the first shooting since a 14-year-old shot dead two classmates in a school in the coastal city of Rauma in 1989.
"It's incredible that something like this has happened in Finland," said Jokela high school history and psychology professor Kim Kiuru.
Finland has one of the world's highest gun ownership rates, ranking third behind the United States and Yemen according to a recent study by Small Arms Survey by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.
Most of the registered weapons in Finland are hunting rifles.
AFP, AAP and staff reporters
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22722827-661,00.htmlSturmgeist89's YouTube rantCALLING himself "Sturmgeist89", this is the sick YouTube rant that appeared to anticipate the shooting massacre in Finland.
Sturmgeist89
aka NaturalSelector89 (3/15/2007 - 10/19/2007).
YouTube suspended my previous account but I am back now Smiley My new account name is German and means "Stormspirit" in English.
Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen
Age: 18
Male from Finland.
I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist.
I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.
You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand... You will proprably say me that I am"insane", "crazy", "psychopath", "criminal" or crap like that. No, the truth is that I am just an animl, a human, an individual, a dissident.
I have had enough. I don't want to be part of this f----d up society. Like some other wise people have said in the past, human race is not worth fighting for or saving... only worth killing. But... When my enemies will run and hide in fear when mentioning my name... When the gangsters of the corrupted governments have been shot in the streets... When the rule of idioracy and the democratic system has been replaced with justice... When intelligent people are finally free and rule the society instead of the idiocratic rule of majority... In that great day of deliverance, you will know what I want.
Long live the revolution... revolution against the system, which enslaves not only the majority of weak-minded masses but also the small minority of strong-minded and intelligent individuals! If we want to live in a different world, we must act. We must rise against the enslaving, corrupted and totalitarian regimes and overthrow the tyrants, gangsters and the rule of idiocracy. I can't alone change much but hopefully my actions will inspire all the intelligent people of the world and start some sort of revolution against the current systems. The system discriminating naturality and justice, is my enemy. The people living in the world of delusion and supporting this system are my enemies.
I am ready to die for a cause I know is right, just and true... even if I would lose or the battle would be only remembered as evil... I will rather fight and die than live a long and unhappy life.
And remember that this is my war, my ideas and my plans. Don't blame anyone else for my actions than myself. Don't blame my parents or my friends. I told nobody about my plans and I always kept them inside my mind only. Don't blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read. No, they had nothing to do with this. This is my war: one man war against humanity, governments and weak-minded masses of the world! No mercy for the scum of the earth! HUMANITY IS OVERRATED! It's time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!
Justice renders to everyone his due.
Country: Finland
Occupation: Unemployed Philosopher, Outcast
Companies: Human Race (evolved one step above though)
Interests and Hobbies: Existentialism, Freedom, Truth, Misantrophy, Social / Personality Psychology, Evolution Science, Political Incorrectness, Women, BDSM, Guns (I love you Catherine), Shooting, Computer Games, Sarcasm, Irony, Mass / Serial Killers, Macabre Art, Black Comedy, Absurdism
Movies and Shows: The Matrix, A View To A Kill, Falling Down, Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, Last Man Standing, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Butcher MD (aka Zombie Holocaust), Saw 1-3, Lord Of War, The Deer Hunter, True Romance, The Untouchables, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Idiocracy, They Live, Apocalypse Now, End Of Days, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Dr. Strangelove, House MD (TV), Monty Python, TV Documentaries Relating To History
Music: KMFDM, Rammstein, Eisbrecher, Nine Inch Nails, Grendel, Impaled Nazarene, Macabre, Deathstars, The Prodigy, Combichrist, Godsmack, Slayer, Children Of Bodom, Alice Cooper, Sturmgeist, Suicide Commando, Hatebreed, Suffocation, Terrorizer
Books: Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), The Republic (Plato), all works of Nietzsche
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22722981-663,00.htmlWell, I will see more in the future if this keep up.
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