A man armed with a bladed weapon attacked
students at a vocational college in eastern Finland on Tuesday, killing
one person in an attack that left ten injured, including a police
officer, police said.
Witnesses said a young man with a sword burst into a classroom. Police have yet to establish a motive for the attack.
Emergency services were called to Savo Vocational College, situated in
the Herman shopping centre in the eastern town of Kuopio, at 12:29 pm
(0929 GMT), police said.
"The suspect was carrying a sabre-type bladed weapon," detective
superintendent Mikko Lyytinen from East Finland Police told a press
conference.
The suspect was also carrying a gun, he said.
Authorities have not named the suspect but have identified him as a
Finnish citizen born in 1994 and enrolled as a student at the college.
Eyewitness reports in Finnish media said the suspected assailant went on a rampage in a classroom.
"He hit a girl in the neck with a sword and stabbed her in the stomach,"
an unnamed eyewitness told Keskisuomalainen newspaper. The attacker
also set off "some sort of small firebombs", the eyewitness said.
Police have yet to release details about the murder victim.
"I can confirm only at this stage that the victim was a woman," detective superintendent Lyytinen said.
Another eyewitness, Roosa Kokkonen, who works in a car garage opposite
the college, told Finnish TV channel MTV that a teacher with blood
running from her hand came fleeing out of the building.
"While I was helping the teacher, I started hearing other shouts for
help. Students were running away and into my garage," Kokkonen told MTV
News.
She also told Finnish news agency STT that students described the weapon
as "a long sword", and that he "started swinging the sword around in
the class".
Officers shot the suspect when they apprehended him less than 10 minutes after receiving the emergency call.
"The suspect was seriously injured during his detention and is being
treated at Kuopio University Hospital," police said in a statement.
One police officer sustained minor injuries at the scene. Two other people were in serious condition in hospital.
Police also said the suspect started a fire on the second floor of the building which was quickly extinguished.
- 'Shocking' -
A search of the suspect's home later revealed items that can be used to
make Molotov cocktails and "other fire-starting equipment", Lyytinen
said.
He said police had seized and were examining the suspect's computers to find clues as to a motive.
"The perpetrator is suspected of murder and a number of other violent
assault charges, as well as attempted murder and attempted assault. The
specific charges will be confirmed as the investigation proceeds,"
police said.
The college and shopping centre is approximately two kilometres from the
centre of Kuopio, a town of 110,000 inhabitants in the centre-east of
Finland approximately 230 kilometres (140 miles) from the Russian
border.
In a tweet, Finnish Prime Minister Antti Rinne described the attack as "shocking and utterly reprehensible".
Violent crime is relatively rare in Finland, a sparsely populated Nordic
nation of 5.4 million people. However two school shootings in the late
2000s caused widespread shock and led to changes in the country's gun
laws.
In 2007, an 18-year-old man killed seven students as well as the
headteacher of a high school in the small town of Jokela, southern
Finland.
A similar attack the following year at a university of applied sciences
in Kauhajoki, western Finland, claimed 10 lives as well as that of the
22-year-old gunman.
In 2017, two people were killed and eight injured in a stabbing attack
in the main square of Turku, a city in southwest Finland. The
perpetrator, Abderrahman Bouanane, an asylum seeker, was later sentenced
to life imprisonment for murder and attempted murder with terrorist
intent.
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