"He did what he did because he was who he is.'' Auvinen shot himself in the head following the massacre, having first signalled his intentions in a video posted on YouTube.

Witnesses described chaos and panic as Auvinen killed his headmistress, five boys and two girls, and wounded a dozen others as they tried to flee the carnage. A pupil, Terhi Vayrynen, 17, told the Associated Press that her brother Henri, 13, witnessed the killing of the headteacher through his classroom window. The girl said the gunman came into Henri's class shouting: "Revolution. Smash everything."

He shot at a television and windows, but not at pupils, and ran off down the corridor. Extremist movements

A teacher, Kim Kiuru, told a local radio station the gunman had been keenly interested in war history and extremist movements. "He was moving systematically through the school hallways, knocking on the doors and shooting through the doors,'' said Mr Kiuru, who was teaching an eighth-grade class when the gunfire started. "It felt unreal,'' he added. "A pupil I have taught myself was running toward me, screaming, a pistol in his hand.''

Local police said the gun used was legal and Auvinen had been issued a permit through a gun club three weeks ago. Mr Kiuru said the headteacher announced the danger over the public address system just before midday and ordered all children to remain in their classrooms.

"After that I saw the gunman running with what appeared to be a small calibre handgun in his hand through the doors toward me, after which I escaped to the corridor downstairs and ran in the opposite direction.'' "Then my pupils shouted at me out of the windows to ask what they should do and I told them to jump out of the windows ... and all my pupils were saved." "We heard the shots and then we broke the windows and jumped out," said Franz Andersin, 14, who was in the school when the shooting spree started.

'Always smiling' "I knew the guy. He was always smiling. I wonder why he did it," he said.

Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen described the shooting, the worst in the Nordic country's history, as "a great tragedy". "This is an awful day ... The shooting has deeply undermined the sense of security in society ... Nobody had expected such things," he said. The rampage began at 11.43am on Wednesday (8.43pm AEDT) inside a classroom at Jokela High School in the small town of Tuusula. The secondary school has about 450 pupils.



Auvinen had posted a video, entitled Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007, on YouTube in the past two weeks.

The video zooms in on the school with heavy metal music blaring in the background and shows a young man against a red background pointing a gun at the camera. Within hours of the shooting, the video had been downloaded more than 200,000 times.

'Prepared to fight' In his profile on YouTube, Auvinen, calling himself Sturmgeist89, says: "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. "I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.

"You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want? Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand," he added. He was pronounced dead at 10.14pm (7.14am Thursday AEST) after being treated for a single gunshot wound to the head at Helsinki University Hospital.

"He died at 22.14 of a one-bullet injury in the head," Eero Hirvensalochief, a traumatology physician at the hospital, said. Police and school pupils alike were at a loss to explain why Auvinen had committed such a terrible act. Normal family

"He comes from a very normal family of four people, he has one brother. He had no problems in school," police officer Jan-Olav Nyholm said. One of Auvinen's classmates, told the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper that the gunman, who was a sports shooter, had recently been acting "strange'' and had begun making drawings of gun massacres.

He had logged into his YouTube account on Wednesday morning. Other videos posted under his name hail the perpetrators of school shootings in the US and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. According to media reports, he had repeatedly expressed admiration for Hitler and Stalin and he names Nietzsche as a favourite author on his YouTube account.

The US-style shooting sent shockwaves through Finland, where such violence is extremely rare. While there have been several stabbings at Finnish schools in recent years, Wednesday's was the first shooting since a 14-year-old shot dead two classmates in a school in the coastal city of Rauma in 1989.

"It's incredible that something like this has happened in Finland," said Jokela High School history and psychology professor Kim Kiuru. Finland has one of the world's highest gun ownership rates, ranking third behind the US and Yemen, according to a recent study by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.



Most of the registered weapons in Finland are hunting rifles. AFP

