...

Finland memorial for gun victims

Other News Materials 28 September 2008 12:16 (UTC +04:00)

A memorial service is to be held in Finland for victims of a high school shooting spree, reported BBC.

On Tuesday, Matti Juhani Saari, aged 22, shot 10 people in Kauhajoki, before turning his gun on himself.

The church service will be attended by President Tarja Halonen and students of Kauhajoki Vocational School, where the shootings took place.

The murders took place less than a year after another school shooting in which nine people died, including the killer.

Saari, a 22-year-old student at the school, was seen entering it dressed in black and wearing a ski mask.

He killed nine people in one classroom and fatally wounded another in a hallway before setting the school on fire.

He then shot himself and later died in hospital.

Eight of his victims were female students and one was a teacher.

Investigators say they are studying a possible link between the shootings and a similar murder spree at a school north of Helsinki last year.

The massacres have provoked the government into considering tightening the country's gun laws, among the loosest in Europe.

Finns have the third highest ratio of gun ownership in the world, after the US and Yemen, according to an international survey of small arms carried out in 2007.

Latest

Latest