Finland Declares Day of Mourning After School Murders (Update2)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a93qSS2IfiiY&refer=europe

By Diana ben-Aaron and Juho Erkheikki

Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Finland declared a national day of mourning after yesterday's killing of six high school pupils and two staff members, the deadliest peacetime attack in the country's history.

An 18-year-old man armed with a handgun shot six students, five male and one female, as well as a 43-year-old nurse and the principal, Helena Kalmi, 61, at Jokela High School yesterday. The gunman then shot himself in the head and died in a Helsinki hospital last night.

``First I felt pity, then anger,'' said Seppo Halonen, a civil servant who has lived in Jokela for more than 20 years, as he stared past police barricades in wet snowfall at the school last night. ``It's impossible to imagine the agony the parents are going through.''

The gunman, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, came from a family of rock musicians and was a member of a local shooting club. He left a warning on YouTube about two hours before police were alerted to the shootings at lunchtime yesterday.

Police said at a news conference last night that his motives and the sequence of the shootings were still unclear. The gunman was a social outcast who was bullied in school, the Associated Press cited a senior police official as saying.

YouTube Video

The YouTube video, titled ``Jokela High School Massacre 11/7/2007,'' opened with an image of the school, and consisted mainly of red cartoon-like pictures of Auvinen shooting at the viewer. Auvinen's user profile, Sturmgeist89, included a manifesto in which he described himself as a ``natural selector'' who ``will eliminate all whom I see unfit, disgraces to the human race and failures of natural selection.''

Auvinen's YouTube account carried a total of 89 videos, including films of himself at target practice or showing pills labeled as antidepressants together with footage of the two students who carried out the Columbine, Colorado, massacre in 1999.

Auvinen also left a suicide note, in which he said goodbye to his family, police said at a briefing today.

Police said they found 69 bullet casings at the scene, and Auvinen had more than 320 live bullets left. He also tried to start a fire on the second floor of the school, they said.

Auvinen used a 22-caliber Sig Sauer Mosquito pistol capable of firing 10 bullets in five seconds, according to police.

Finland has the most guns per capita in Europe, a total of 1.8 million firearms outside of army use in a country of 5.3 million people, according to Amnesty International. That is the third-highest rate in the world after the U.S. and Yemen. Any adult can own a gun if it is registered with a shooting club.

Country Village

Jokela, whose narrow roads were yesterday blanketed in wet snow, is a typical Finnish country village with a couple of grocery stores, a gas station, a convenience store, and two pubs. Although many people commute to work in Helsinki, less than half an hour's train ride away, it has a vibrant community life and a young, growing population.

After 9 p.m. yesterday, the streets were almost empty.

``You wouldn't think something like this could happen in a village like Jokela,'' said Aleksi Ampuja, a student at the Jokela school, on his way with a friend to a crisis meeting organized for the pupils.

Classes at the secondary school in Jokela, which has a population of 5,300 inhabitants, are cancelled for the rest of the week. Other schools in Tuusula, the municipality, 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) north of Helsinki, where Jokela is located, will open as usual.

Dead Students

The male students who died ranged in age from 16 to 18, according to a police statement. The female student was 25 years old and raising two children by herself, the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat said. Students in Finland are able to leave school at 16 and return later for extra years of study that allow them to apply to university.

Officers found Auvinen wounded in the head from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot. The assailant and most of the victims were in the lower lobby of the school, police said. Ten children were hospitalized following the attack. Twelve people were wounded in total and were allowed home last night. The emergency was declared over after 3 p.m., according to the Tuusula municipality Web site.

Auvinen died at 10:14 p.m., Eero Hirvensalo, a senior physician at Helsinki's Toeoeloe Hospital where he was taken, said in an interview.

``This deals a heavy blow to our feeling of security,'' Finland's Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said in a press conference last night. ``As a society and a community, we have gotten used to feeling secure, and this event opens a crack that will last for a long time.''

1989 Incident

In 1989, a 14-year-old boy in Finland killed two students over alleged bullying in a school shooting.

Yesterday's attack was the first major incident involving schoolchildren or students since a lone gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, known as Virginia Tech, in the U.S. on April 16.

On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students, one teacher and themselves. On March 13, 1996, a gunman killed 16 children, a teacher and himself at Dunblane Primary School in Dunblane, Scotland.

Auvinen's father, Ismo Auvinen, who has worked for the Finnish railways for more than 30 years, performs in the Big Papa Auvinen band with his wife, Mikaela Vuorio, according to the group's Web page.

Rock Band

The elder Auvinen used to play guitar with Finnish rock legend Albert Jaervinen, whose band The Hurriganes is the subject of a popular movie in the country. Jaervinen died in 1991 on a London block already made famous by the death of Jimi Hendrix there 21 years earlier.

Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the first of two sons, was described in the Finnish media as a straight-A student who was attracted to extreme political views. His friends noticed a change in his behavior weeks before the shooting and warned the principal about him, local newspapers said, citing unidentified classmates. He got a permit to carry a gun on Oct. 19, state broadcaster YLE said.

``The authorities knew the killer's background,'' Halonen said. ``They should have acted on the knowledge.''

Tuusula is still largely countryside. Its roads plunge into virgin pine forest, offering families the chance to build a house on their own land while still remaining within an easy commute of Helsinki.

The Jokela school remained cordoned off by police and soldiers as people left candles nearby. The church where students waited for the attack to be over is open around the clock as a crisis center.

To contact the reporter on this story: Diana ben-Aaron in Helsinki at dbenaaron1@bloomberg.net ; Juho Erkheikki in Helsinki at jerkheikki@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: November 8, 2007 11:37 EST