YouTube gunman kills 10 at school

Terrified students ran screaming from the building as the killer went on the rampage.

One witness spoke of hearing “the moans of people dying”.

The gunman, armed with a .22-calibre pistol and explosives, entered the vocational college in Finland dressed in black and wearing a ski mask.

It came after he posted menacing gun videos on the internet.

He was named by the school’s headmaster as Matti Juhani Saari, 22, a second-year trainee chef.

School caretaker Jukka Forsberg said: “A cold-blooded shooter entered the building with an automatic pistol and started cutting down students.”

The killer used explosives to start a fire that left some of his victims burned beyond recognition.

He was admitted to hospital with severe head wounds and died on the operating table. A further two people were fighting for their lives in hospital.

Caretaker Mr Forsberg said two girls ad told him a man was shooting. “I saw a guy leaving a big black bag in the corridor and going into classroom number three and closing the door,” he said.

“I looked through the window and he immediately shot at me. Then I called the emergency number. Thank God I was not hit, he fired at me but I was running zigzag. I ran for my life.”

He went on: “I heard horrible screams of pain. I heard constant shooting. He changed another case in the gun. He was very well prepared.

"Within a short space of time I heard several dozen rounds of shots, it was an automatic pistol. I saw some female students who were wailing and moaning.”

Just 24 hours earlier detectives had questioned Saari over footage he posted on YouTube featuring him shooting at a firing range.

On one video he says in English: “You will die next” before repeatedly firing a Walther P22. In another he empties his gun into an off-screen target, walks to the camera and says “goodbye”. Police had found no reason to arrest him or revoke his temporary weapons permit. The killer last visited YouTube about an hour before the shootings started.

Alongside four videos he posted under the name Wumpscut86 was a message reading: “Whole life is war and whole life is pain. And you will fight alone in your personal war.” His profile included the words: “And suddenly there was war and the mothers they screamed for revenge and reprisals for another war.”

Clips of the 1999 Columbine school massacre in Colorado were listed among his favourite videos. His YouTube account was disabled shortly after the incident.

Yesterday’s killing spree took place at Kauhajoki School of Hospitality, 180 miles north west of the capital Helsinki, which teaches catering and tourism studies.  Two hundred students and teachers were thought to be in the college and some had just begun an exam when the gunman struck.

They were evacuated as shots rang around a domestic sciences building. Police called for reinforcements as fires blazed.

Fellow student Susanna Keranen said yesterday: “He was just a regular and calm guy. He had lots of friends. Nothing that would have given an idea that something like this would happen.”

The massacre was the second in Finland within a year. Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said yesterday was a “tragic day”.

It bore eerie similarities to the previous school slaying. Both gunmen posted violent clips on YouTube prior to the massacres, and both were fascinated by the Columbine shootings.

In the last massacre on November 7 last year at a high school in Jokela, a few miles north of Helsinki, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, shot six students, the school’s headmistress and a nurse before turning his gun on himself.

In that incident, the gunman posted a video on YouTube as a preview of his attack, pledging to “eliminate” those he saw as “unfit”.

The shooting spree is the latest in a bloody trend. Some of the most notorious school massacres were:

February 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, killing five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.