WINNENDEN, Germany (AFP) - - A masked teenager in black combat gear went on a bloody rampage at his old school in Germany Wednesday, slaying at least 16 people before dying in a shootout with police, officials said.

The 17-year-old, named as Tim Kretschmer, entered the secondary school in Winnenden near Stuttgart at 9:30 am (0830 GMT), killing 9 pupils aged between 14 and 15 and three teachers in different classrooms with a handgun.

He wandered into several classrooms at the school he left last year, indiscriminately spraying bullets at teachers and students.

"He was constantly reloading his weapon," local police chief Konrad Gelden told reporters.

Police were alerted to the shootings within three minutes and despatched two vehicles to the scene where they discovered the bodies of nine pupils and three teachers -- one of whom had only been working at the school for four weeks.

The 17-year-old then fled the Albertville-Realschule and went to a nearby psychiatric clinic where he shot dead a member of staff and stole a Volkswagen Sharan car. He then sped 40 kilometres (25 miles) to the town of Wendlingen.

By this time a massive manhunt was under way, with hundreds of armed police commandos and snipers in black body armour on his trail, assisted by helicopters and dogs.

"The whole time police were on his trail," Gelden said.

Cornered in the car park of a shopping centre, a shootout between the teenager and the police ensued, in which two passers-by were killed.

Kretschmer was also killed in the shootout at around midday local time, said the police. Two policemen were seriously injured in the fire-fight but they were in a stable condition in hospital.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her condolences to the families and friends of those killed in what she called a "horrendous crime."

"Like all people in Germany, I find what happened today in the Albertville-Realschule in Winnenden incomprehensible," Merkel said in a short statement.

"It is a day of mourning for the whole of Germany. Our thoughts go out to the familes, the friends. We are thinking of you and we are praying for you," Merkel added.

The killings drew international condemnation as well with European Commission president Jose-Manuel Barroso saying he was "appalled and saddened by the senseless violence that cut short so many lives".

The Bild daily said on its website that commandos had stormed the home of the teenager's parents, where 16 weapons were legally held -- one of which the teenager used in his rampage, police said.

Speaking to reporters, the interior minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg state said that there was nothing in the gunman's background to indicate that he had a grudge against the school.

"The gunman wanted to destroy an entire school," Heribert Rech said.

"He was completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened,"

The picturesque town of Winnenden, which lies around 25 kilometres (15 miles) northeast of the city of Stuttgart in Baden-Wuerttemberg, has around 27,000 inhabitants.

The school was part of a complex of several other schools with a total of 1,700 pupils aged from six to 19. At the school where the shooting took place there were 600 pupils.

It was one of the worst school shootings in Germany in recent years.

In April 2002, a disgruntled student from Erfurt in eastern Germany who had been expelled, also killed 15 people before turning the gun on himself.

In November 2006, a former student at a vocational school in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany went a shooting spree in the establishment, injuring 37 people before turning his gun on himself.

The latest shooting also came hours after a gunman went on the rampage in the southern US state of Alabama, mowing down 10 people before turning the gun on himself.

In attacks in Germany, gun access and torment

By Carter Dougherty

WAIBLINGEN, Germany: A portrait of a troubled, depressed teenager with easy access to an unsecured pistol began to emerge Thursday, a day after the youth went on a rampage, killing 15 people before taking his own life.

By Thursday, the police had established that the teenager, Tim Kretschmer, 17, last year broke off a round of psychological counseling for depression.

Searching his bedroom, the police found violent computer games — in which, experts say, players digitally clothe and arm themselves for combat — plus brutal videos and play weapons that fire small yellow pellets, said Siegfried Mahler of the Stuttgart prosecutors' office. And they were trying to verify the authenticity of a reported posting to a chat room in which someone warned of an attack on a school in Winnenden. The killer graduated last year from the school where the attacks took place.

Rather than speak of a specific motive, investigators described Kretschmer as a classic case of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world.

"If we had known this in advance, we would have called him a prototype of a rampager," said Erwin Hetger, the chief of police in Baden-Württemberg, the southeastern German state where the crimes took place.

Of the 12 people Kretschmer killed at the school, 8 were girls, 3 were female teachers and one was a male student. Several were killed with carefully placed shots to the head. After killing an employee of a clinic for the mentally ill, he sprayed at least 13 rounds to kill two people at a Volkswagen dealership before turning the gun on himself.

Prosecutors said they could file criminal charges against the shooter's parents for failing to secure the pistol that he used, as required by German law. The gun was a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol that his father kept unsecured in a bedroom; other firearms owned by his father were under lock and key, the authorities said.

After a shooting seven years ago at a school in Erfurt in the east of the country, German teachers and police officers were trained to respond to violent episodes. That training was on display minutes after the shooting began Wednesday. And on Thursday, offers of help came in from people who had experienced the aftermath of the Erfurt shooting.

But a consensus was building that even the best plans could not prevent every emergency.

"We did a lot in Germany," said Christine Alt, director of the school in Erfurt where the shooting took place. "But it seems we will never find a recipe that is 100 percent effective."

The Internet posting that was being investigated was reported by the father of a youth identified only as Bernd, according to the police. Bernd's information indicated that someone on the site had written: "I have weapons and will go to my old school and really burn them up. I might get out alive, but you will certainly hear about me tomorrow. Remember the name Winnenden."

The police appeared confident of the posting's authenticity early in the day. Later, after the Web site that they named denied that there had been such a posting, the police said they were investigating that new information.

Some German officials said that some people always slipped through the system undetected.

"We need to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute security; that we cannot simply prevent everything," Volker Kauder, the leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, told German public radio. Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister who is in a wheelchair after being partly paralyzed by a bullet to the spine in an October 1990 assassination attempt, played down the need to tighten already tough gun laws.

But with the computer having played such a role in the young man's life, the Winnenden shootings seem likely to renew a debate in Germany over banning violent video games.

"These games basically program the minds of young men a thousand times over," said Alina Wilms, a psychologist involved in treating people affected by the Erfurt shooting, who advocates a ban. "If ever it were going to be possible," she said, "then now."