Report: Several dead in Finland school shooting

[September 23, 2008]  HELSINKI, Finland (AP) -- Finnish broadcaster YLE is reporting that several people have been fatally shot by a gunman who opened fire at a vocational school.

YLE is citing police at the school in Kauhajoki in western Finland. Police could not immediately be reached to confirm the report. They said earlier Tuesday that several people were feared wounded and that the gunman had been disarmed.

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THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP's earlier story is below.

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HELSINKI, Finland (AP) -- A gunman opened fire on students at a school for adults in western Finland Tuesday and several people are feared wounded, police said.

Police disarmed the gunman at the school at Kauhajoki, said Superintendent Jussi Muotio of the Kauhajoki police.

"The incident is over now," said Muotio. "We don't know if he killed anyone but we fear that several have been wounded." He declined to give more details.

Media reports say the shootings began just before 11 a.m. local time when there were some 200 students in the building. Kauhajoki is about 180 miles northwest of Helsinki.

The Finnish news agency STT reported the school building was on fire and that the gunman possibly had explosives on him.

Finnish media said video clips on YouTube of a man firing a gun appeared to be linked to the shooting. In one of them, a young man wearing a leather jacket fires several shots in rapid succession with a handgun at what appears to be a shooting range.

The posting was made five days before the shooting and the location was given as Kauhajoki. The posting included a message saying: "Whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war."

The person who posted the clip identified himself as a 22-year-old with the name "Mr. Saari." He also posted three other clips of himself firing a handgun in the past three weeks.

Clips from the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Colorado were listed among his favorite videos.

Police could not immediately confirm whether the postings were linked to Tuesday's shooting.

The shootings happened almost a year after a gunman killed eight people and himself at a school in southern Finland.

Pekka-Eric Auvinen, described by police as a bullied 18-year-old outcast, opened fire at his high school in southern Finland on Nov. 7 last year. He killed six students, a school nurse and the principal before ending his own life with a gunshot to the head.

Finnish investigators have said Auvinen left a suicide note for his family and foreshadowed his attack in YouTube postings. That attack triggered a debate about gun laws in a Nordic nation with deep-rooted traditions of hunting in the sub-Arctic wilderness.

With 1.6 million firearms in private hands, the Nordic nation is an anomaly in Europe, lagging behind only the U.S. and Yemen in civilian gun ownership, studies show.

The government said after Auvinen's rampage it would raise the minimum age for buying guns from 15 to 18, but insisted there was no need for sweeping changes to Finland's gun laws.

[Associated Press]

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