(AFP) – Nov 7, 2007

TUUSULA, Finland (AFP) — A teenager at a school in Finland went on the rampage Wednesday, shooting dead seven classmates and the headmistress, having first signalled his intentions in a video posted on the YouTube Internet site.

Police identified the killer as 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who died from his injuries late Wednesday after shooting himself in the head following the massacre at Jokela High School in the small town of Tuusula.

Witnesses described chaos and panic as Auvinen killed his headmistress, five boys, two girls, and wounded a dozen others as they tried to flee the carnage.

"We heard the shots and then we broke the windows and jumped out," said Franz Andersin, a 14-year-old student who was in the school when the shooting spree started.

"I knew the guy. He was always smiling. I wonder why he did it," he told AFP.

Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen described the shooting, the worst in the Nordic country's history, as "a great tragedy."

"This is an awful day ... The shooting has deeply undermined the sense of security in society ... Nobody had expected such things," Vanhanen said.

The rampage, which began at 11:43 am (0943 GMT) inside a classroom at the secondary school of some 450 pupils, came after Auvinen posted a video entitled "Jokela High School Massacre -- 11/7/2007" on file-sharing website YouTube.

The video, posted sometime in the past two weeks, zooms in on the school with heavy metal music blaring in the background and shows a young man against a red background pointing a gun at the camera.

Within hours of the shooting, the video had been downloaded more than 200,000 times.

In his profile on YouTube, Auvinen, calling himself Sturmgeist89, says: "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause.

"I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection."

"You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand," he added.

He was pronounced dead at 2214 local time (2014 GMT) after being treated for a single gunshot wound to the head at Helsinki University Hospital.

"He died at 2214 of a one-bullet injury in the head," doctor Eero Hirvensalochief, traumatology physician at the hospital, told AFP.

Police and school pupils alike were at a loss to explain why Auvinen had committed such a terrible act.

"He comes from a very normal family, four people, he has one brother. He had no problems in school," said local police officer Jan-Olav Nyholm naming Auvinen for the first time.

Another of Auvinen's classmates, meanwhile, told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper that the gunman, who was a sports shooter, had recently been acting "strange" and had begun making drawings of gun massacres.

He had logged into his YouTube account on Wednesday morning. Other videos posted under his name hail the perpetrators of school shootings in the United States and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

According to media reports, he had repeatedly expressed admiration for Hitler and Stalin and he names Nietzsche as a favourite author on his YouTube account.

The American-style shooting sent shockwaves through Finland, where such violence is extremely rare.

While there have been several stabbings at Finnish schools in recent years, Wednesday's was the first shooting since a 14-year-old shot dead two classmates in a school in the coastal city of Rauma in 1989.

"It's incredible that something like this has happened in Finland," said Jokela high school history and psychology professor Kim Kiuru.

Finland has one of the world's highest gun ownership rates, ranking third behind the United States and Yemen according to a recent study by Small Arms Survey by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

Most of the registered weapons in Finland are hunting rifles.

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