One person was killed and 10 wounded after an attack on Tuesday, October 1, in a vocational high school in Kuopio, in central-eastern Finland, according to local authorities. "The police used their weapon, an assailant was arrested, the wounded were evacuated," two of them in serious condition, the police said in a statement.
The circumstances of this attack remain unclear, as are the motives of the arrested suspect. According to local media reports, the attacker, a young man who is among the wounded, burst into the morning in one of the classes of the Savo vocational training institute, a structure that welcomes high school students and adults, equipped with 'a sabre.
"A kind of little incendiary bomb"
"He hit a girl around the neck with a sword and stabbed her in the abdomen," a witness told the local press. The attacker also unleashed "a kind of small incendiary bomb," he added. Another witness, Roosa Kokkonen, who works near the school, told Finnish TV channel MTV that a teacher ran out of the building with her hands full of blood.
Although violent crime remains relatively rare in the Nordic country of 5.4 million people, Finland has already been hit by two mass killings in schools in the late 2000s.
An attack in a high school in 2007
In 2007, an 18-year-old boy shot dead seven students and the head of a high school in Tuusula, north of Helsinki, before killing himself. In September 2008, a student killed 10 people in a vocational high school in Kauhajoki (west), before he also killed himself.
In August 2017, a 22-year-old Moroccan asylum seeker had fatally stabbed two women and wounded eight others in Turku, in the south-west of the country. The man was sentenced in June 2018 to life imprisonment for murder and attempted terrorist killings.
With AFP