In Finland, child killed in school shooting, 12-year-old suspect arrested

Marc Ulander / AFP

At this Finnish school, the first reports of shootings show one student dead and two injured.

INTERNATIONAL – The trauma of the shooting resurfaced. Finland woke up this Tuesday, April 2, to discover a terrible tragedy at the Viertola school in the town of Vantaa, where a young armed boy was arrested after several students were shot in the establishment.

Of particular note, the shooting suspect arrested by police is only 12 years old. Same age as all three victims. At noon, the first reports were of a dead child and two ” seriously injured “

The school, north of Helsinki, which accommodates 800 students aged 7 to 15, was hit hard by the attack, which happened just before 9 a.m. local time. But it took only an hour to catch the police. in peace » The main suspect is educated in this institute. “The criminal had a weapon”The Finnish police also confirmed on their website.

At this time, it is still very difficult to establish the motives of this shooting. “I can only imagine the pain and anxiety that many families are feeling right now.”At X the Minister of the Interior, Mari Rantanen, responded, adding that the day had begun “shockingly”.

A police official said the young suspect will not be held in jail as he is under 15 years of age. He will therefore be handed over to social services after his enquiry.

The shocks of 2007 and 2008

In Vantaa, Finland’s fourth-largest city, it was impossible to see on Tuesday the ghost of a school shooting that shocked the population in the 2000s revival.

The first was in November 2007, when an 18-year-old opened fire at a middle school in Jokela, about fifty kilometers north of the capital Helsinki, killing eight people: the director, a nurse and six students. A year later, in September 2008, ten people were killed in a shooting, this time at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, by 22-year-old Matti Juhani Saari. The shooters committed suicide after these two shootings.

Citing a review Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime PreventionAgence France-Presse shows that since then hundreds of schools have been threatened with similar acts, each time with mental health issues singled out for their direct or indirect role in the shooting.

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