http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe...ing/index.html

At least nine dead in Finnish college shooting

(CNN) -- A man opened fire at a college in southwestern Finland Tuesday, killing at least nine students, officials said.

The shooter then tried to kill himself but was not successful, Antti Rantakokko, the mayor of Kauhajoki where the shooting occurred, reported.

Several other people were wounded in the attack, but officials could not immediately say how many.

"We can't tell you exactly how many people are in bad condition," the mayor said. "We don't have the numbers yet."

The shots were reported at a college for home- and institutional-economics in the municipality of Kauhajoki, according to YLE, a Finnish national broadcaster. Watch more about the shooting »

A 22-year-old student of the school walked into a classroom full of students who were taking a test, and opened fire about 11 a.m., YLE said.

Jukka Forsberg, a maintenance worker at the school, said the man was wearing a ski mask and walked into the building with a large bag, the agency said. About 150 students were on campus at the time.

The man later shot himself in the head, but survived, Mikka Pettersson of the Finnish News Agency (STT) told CNN.

Smoke billowed from a building on campus but officials could not immediately say what caused the fire. Three hours after the shooting, firefighters were still trying to bring a blaze under control, fire official Olle Peauttonen told CNN.

Tapio Varmola, a staff member at the school, told CNN he was in a building about two blocks away when the shootings occurred.

"I did not hear anything," he said. "We did not know what happened. It became clear later."

After the shootings, he said, he heard students shouting. Police came about 10 minutes after they were called, Varmola said.

"It took two hours to get this situation ended," he said.

The school taught late teens and young adults, Jarkko Sipila of MTV 3 told CNN. "It's more or less like an agricultural or professional school where people teach how to make food or how to cook in big kitchen, in industrial kitchens," he said.

Meanwhile, speculation surrounded a video on Web site YouTube, which appeared to show a man from the town of Kauhajoki firing a pistol at a shooting range. It was eventually withdrawn from the site.

Kauhajoki, with a population of about 15,000, is about 290km (180 miles) from the capital, Helsinki.

The incident comes almost a year after another school shooting left nine people, including the gunman, dead in the Finnish town of Tuusala.

Before that shooting, the gunman, 18-year-old student Pekka-Eric Auvinen, posted a video on YouTube titled "Jokela High School Massacre 11/7/2007" -- identifying the date and location of the attack.


"All these memories are being brought back and people are asking the question, 'Why again'?" Sipila said.

Finland enjoys a strong tradition of hunting and has a high proportion of gun ownership, with 2 million firearms owned in a nation of 5 million people.