An 18-year-old student opened fire at his high school in this placid town in southern Finland on Wednesday, killing eight people before shooting himself in a rampage that stunned a nation where gun crime is rare.
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, was known to support radical causes and he carried out his massacre on Wednesday's 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
The Auvinen was rushed to a hospital in Helsinki with a gunshot wound to his head after the shooting at Jokela High School in Tuusula, some 50km north of the capital.
He was pronounced dead later on Wednesday.
"There was no hope," said Eero Hirvensalo, chief of the Toolo Hospital in central Helsinki. "His condition was critical from the beginning."
POSTINGS
Police were analyzing YouTube postings that appeared to anticipate the massacre, including clips in which a young man calls for revolution and apparently prepares for the attack by test firing a semiautomatic handgun.
Auvinen shot the victims -- five boys, two girls and the female principal -- with a .22-caliber pistol, police said, adding about a dozen other people were injured as they tried to escape from the school.
Witnesses described a scene of mayhem in the leafy lakeside community, in which the assailant scoured the school for victims shouting slogans of "revolution."
GUN CLUB
Police chief Matti Tohkanen said the gunman belonged to a gun club and got a license for the pistol on Oct. 19. He did not have a previous criminal record, Tohkanen said.
"He was from an ordinary family," he said.
Investigators were searching for a possible motive in the YouTube postings that appeared to reveal plans of the deadly attack.
One video, titled "Jokela High School Massacre," showed a picture of a what appeared to be the school and two photos of a young man holding a handgun.
The person who posted the video was identified in the user profile as an 18-year-old man from Finland. The posting was later removed.
The profile contained a text calling for a "revolution against the system."
Another YouTube video clip showed a young man clad in a dark jacket loading a clip into a handgun and firing several shots at an apple placed on the ground in a forested area. He smiled and waved to the camera at the end of the clip.
A third clip showed photos of what appeared to be same man posing with a gun and wearing a T-shirt with the text "Humanity is overrated."
Police said they would investigate any possible connection the gunman might have had to the video.
Kim Kiuru, a teacher at the school, said the principal announced over the public address system just before noon that all students should remain in their classrooms.
"After that I saw the gunman running with what appeared to be a small caliber handgun in his hand through the doors toward me after which I escaped to the corridor downstairs and ran in the opposite direction," Kiuru told reporters.
Kiuru said he saw a woman's body as he fled the building.
"Then my pupils shouted at me out of the windows to ask what they should do and I told them to jump out of the windows ... and all my pupils were saved," Kiuru said.
Terhi Vayrynen, 17, a student at the school said that her brother Henri Vayrynen, 13, and his classmates had witnessed the shooting of the principal outside the school through the classroom window.
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