Gunman kills 8 after YouTube rant

SEVEN students and a school principal have been killed by a pupil who opened fire with a handgun in a school in a small town in southern Finland hours after posting a video on YouTube predicting a massacre.

The gunman, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen, later died in a Helsinki hospital. He had been taken there with a gunshot wound to the head after turning his weapon on himself during the shooting in Tuusula, 50km south of the capital.

Witnesses described chaos and panic as Auvinen shot dead his headmistress, 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," Franz Andersin, a 14-year-old student, said.

"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''.

The YouTube video, set to a hard-driving song called Stray Bullet, shows a still photo of a low building that appears to be Jokela High School.

The photo breaks apart to reveal a red-tinted picture of a man pointing a handgun at the camera.

Entitled Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007, it was was posted by a user called Sturmgeist89. “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,” he wrote in a post. “I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.”

“Sturmgeist” means storm spirit in German.

A user of the same name posted several videos two weeks ago, all with a theme of terrorism, massacres and genocide. The account has been deactivated.

Among the videos posted include a tribute to Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, a tribute to US terrorist the Unabomber, a selection of scenes from Schindler's List in which Jews are tortured and killed and a post glorifying the last days of the Twin Towers.

Gunman worked 'systematically'

“He (the gunman) was moving systematically through the school hallways, knocking on the doors and shooting through the doors,” said Kim Kiuru, who was teaching a grade 8 class when the shooting began.

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

Police said the gun used in the massacre was legal and registered to the gunman on October 19.

“When police arrived there was complete chaos, pupils were jumping out of the building through the windows,”inspector Timo Leppala, head of the field investigation, said .

Outside a church community building close by, a mother waited as a Red Cross bus pulled up outside.

She watched children stepping off the bus and burst into tears when, through a window, she spotted her child, unharmed.

The school serves some 500 middle and high school students.

“This is a peaceful place, nothing like this has happened and nothing like this is to be expected either,” Tuusula mayor Hannu Joensivusaid.

Despite having the world's third-largest per capita handgun ownership, violent incidents are rare at Finnish schools.

According to Finnish media, there have been four stabbings at schools since 1999. None of these caused fatalities.

The last major attack in the country occurred in 2002 when a young man killed including himself and six others in a bomb blast at a shopping mall in Helsinki.

News Limited

Additional reporting by Sakari Suoninen, Terhi Kinnunen and Agnieszka Flak