The Winnenden school shooting appeared on Friday to have sparked a rash of copycat threats across Germany, as two men were arrested and a school was evacuated after police received information of internet warnings.
After Tim Kretschmer’s rampage, in which 16 people died, police in the northern town of Ennepetal arrested a 17-year-old boy who allegedly bragged to his fellow pupils that he was planning an attack on his school. A search of his home revealed a stash of instructions on how to make explosives and a “chemical substance.”
In the town of Ilsfeld, 32km from Winnenden, the high school was sealed off on Friday after police learned of a threat posted in an Internet forum. They found no evidence to support the threat during their search.
In the northern state of Lower Saxony a 21-year-old man was arrested after threatening to kill 16 people at a school in the area of Soltau.
“I have a weapon and am going to kill everyone,” the message posted on an Internet chat site said.
Police said he possessed no weapons and claimed to have been “joking.”
The man could be charged with disturbing the peace.
It was revealed yesterday that a message supposedly written as a warning by Kretschmer the day before his rampage was a hoax.
The note, which was dated hours before 17-year-old Kretschmer killed nine students and three teachers at his former school, as well as three other people, had been hailed by Baden-Wuerttemberg Interior Minister Heribert Rech as a dramatic breakthrough in the inquiry.
But Rech said it was faked.
“Some madman obviously put out this awful false message,” he told the Suddeutsche Zeitung. “It must have been made up afterwards.”
Police in Winnenden said they were working with US authorities, where the servers hosting the German-language Web site are located, to try to establish who was responsible for the hoax.
Accusing Rech of an “embarrassing” error, opposition politicians urged that the shooting investigation be carried out thoroughly.
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