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At least nine dead after student 'armed with explosives' opens fire at school in Finland


At least nine people have been killed this morning after a gunman opened fire at a school in Finland.

The student, wearing a black hood and armed with an automatic weapon, is said to have started shooting at a college for adults in the town of Kauhajoki just before 11am (8am GMT) today.

A fire had broken out at the school but has now been extinguished. Finnish news agency STT said that the gunman possibly had explosives on him.

The gunman is 'severely wounded' but still alive, according to a hospital spokesperson, after shooting himself.

In a chilling echo of last year's Jokela high school massacre that shocked Finland, the shooter posted a video warning of his rampage on YouTube, the Finnish government has confirmed.

Reports suggested the shooter was known to police. He was being taken to a hospital in Tampere, a two-hour drive from the scene of shooting, the hospital's medical director Matti Lehto said.

Lehto said the gunman was "shot in the head so he is severely injured." He also said a woman with a gunshot wound to the head was also heading to the hospital.

The school, which calls itself the "Kauhajoki School of Hospitality", had 150 students and 40 teachers as of 2005, according to the official website. It teaches catering, tourism studies and home economics.

The shooting began in a classroom where 20 of the students were sitting down to take an exam.

Finnish media said the YouTube clips show a young man wearing a leather jacket firing several shots in rapid succession with a handgun at what appears to be a shooting range.

The videos show the same man practising at the range over several different days. They have since been removed from YouTube amid speculation he may be the shooter

A search of YouTube yielded four videos filmed by a user who calls himself Mr. Saari, who said he was 22 years old and lived in Kauhajoki.

Finnish newspapers have claimed the man in the video is the shooter.

The YouTube user's profile included the words: "And suddenly there was war and the mothers they screamed. For revenge and reprisals for another war."

Another quote read: "Whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war."

The postings were made from three weeks to five days before the shooting. Clips from the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Colorado were listed among the poster's favorite videos.

The clips have since been removed.

A BBC correspondent said the shooter had been dressed in black and carrying an automatic weapon.

There were reports of at least one girl leaving the school covered in blood.

More than 200 have been evacuated from the school. Five police squads were said to be on the scene.

Jukka Forsberg, a maintenance worker at the college, told Finnish television station YLE that several people have suffered injuries.

The worker said a man with a ski mask went into the building with a large bag. Soon after, he heard shots fired.

Kauhajoki is in western Finland, over 200 miles from Helsinki.

The country is still struggling to recover from the horror of a shooting at a secondary school last year.

The gunman in that incident, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who was one of the school's students, also warned of his massacre over YouTube in a chilling video in which he said he would "eliminate all I see".

He killed nine people: six students, the school principal and school nurse, and himself.

Witnesses said the Auvinen had clinically walked from classroom to classroom at Joleka High School in southern Finland, selecting his victims before shooting them.

The headmistress tried to stop him but he shot her seven times in front of a group of ninth graders.

Terrified pupils jumped for their lives from windows before the Auvinen shouted: "This is the start of the revolution" and shot himself in the head.

Before that the country had not experienced a school shooting since 1989.

Kauhajoki has a population of 14,596 and covers an area of 1,315.46km. The vast area means there are just 11.1 inhabitants per sq km.

Finland has one of the highest proportions of gun ownership in the world, with some two million guns in a population of five million. It ranks third after the United States and Yemen, according to a study last year by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

After the Jokela rampage, the government said 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.


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Aside from the obvious tragedy that has occurred and 9 people have lost their lives for no good reason, the fact that this guy posted videos on youtube warning of this really chills me - the video's have been removed from youtube but they have already been posted online at other sources and will be viewed by millions.

How many copycat type events are we going to see now on the internet? scary stuff.

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