A 12-year-old boy was killed and two others seriously injured on Tuesday when a classmate opened fire at a primary school on the outskirts of Helsinki.reported the police.
“Today, after 9:00 a.m. (0600 GMT), there was a shooting in a school (…) in which a sixth-grader at the school died,” Ilkka Koskimaki, the region’s police chief, said at a press conference Press conference. .
He added that two other minors were “seriously injured.”
The shooting occurred at a primary school in the town of Vantaa, which, according to its website, has about 800 students aged 7 to 15, split between two centers.
Police arrived at the facility shortly after the shooting and the suspect was arrested an hour later in Helsinki.
“The arrest was carried out calmly. The suspect was carrying a weapon,” police said on their website.
A video broadcast by the Iltalehti newspaper depicting the moment of the suspect’s arrest shows two police officers holding a person lying face down.
A witness told the newspaper that the shots echoed in the yard. “At first I didn’t know it was a gun. Then there was a terrible scream and the children ran into the yard,” he explained.
Parents of children who attended the school told Finnish media that the shooting took place in a classroom and claimed they were able to speak to their children on the phone.
Janne Savolainen said she had been in contact with her daughter while classes were closed. “She was able to send me WhatsApp messages saying that they were sitting on the floor waiting for the teachers’ instructions,” she told AFP, expressing her “huge” reaction of surprise at what was otherwise a quiet day place such a drama took place.
The children were held in classrooms and many parents went to school where they were treated by police, public television Yle reported.
According to Finnish media, a crisis cabinet has been set up with employees from the education and city councils.
Precedents in the 2000s
Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen said the day had started “terribly” in a message on the social media site X.
“I can only imagine the pain and worry that many families are going through right now,” he added.
The country experienced two similar tragedies in the early 2000s.
In November 2007, an 18-year-old young man opened fire in a secondary school in Jokela, about fifty kilometers north of Helsinki, killing eight people: the headmaster, the nurse and six students. The attacker committed suicide after the attack.
A year later, in September 2008, there was a shooting by a 22-year-old young man at a vocational school in Kauhajoki (West), in which ten people died. The attacker also committed suicide shortly afterwards.
Since then, hundreds of schools have been threatened by similar acts, according to the Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention mental problems as the main reason for these attacks.
AFP