Get the stories that matter to you sent straight to your inbox with our daily newsletter. Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

CLASSROOM executioner Tim Kretschmer was a woman-hater who killed to take revenge on the whole female sex, a neighbour claimed last night.

Twelve of Kretschmer's 15 victims were women. Eight of the nine pupils he killed at his old school were girls and all three of the teachers he gunned down were female.

Locals in the sleepy German town of Winnenden said Kretschmer, 17, could not relate to women and had never had a girlfriend.

And one former friend said the killer harboured an obsessive grudge against one of the women who taught him at the town's Albertville technical school.

The source said: "He always complained about one of his teachers.

"He said that she bullied him and threatened him that if he continued as he was he would end up on the rubbish heap.

"He completely hated her, as he did all women in general."

It's not known whether the teacher was among Kretschmer's victims.

The teenage misfit walked into the school in black combat gear and started shooting with his dad's 9mm Beretta.

He walked coolly from classroom to classroom, reloading as he went, and returned to one room to ask the survivors: "Aren't you all dead yet?"

Kretschmer fled after police stormed the building, stopping briefly to kill a gardener at a nearby psychiatric clinic where he used to be a patient.

Later, he hijacked a car and headed for the town of Wendlingen. There, he shot dead a salesman and a customer at a car showroom before police finally cornered him in a car park.

After a marksman shot Kretschmer in the leg, he turned the Beretta on himself. Two cops were seriously wounded in the final shootout.

Kretschmer was never happy at the Albertville school, where he graduated last year with mediocre grades. He often moaned to acquaintances that the kids teased him and the teachers ignored him.

He spent hours in his bedroom, where 30 replica weapons hung on the walls, playing a "first-person shooter" video game called Counter Strike.

A friend said: "He was good."

The police who searched Kretschmer's computer found other violent games, Gothic horror films and a stash of pornography.

Kretschmer also enjoyed shooting people in real life. He owned several "soft pellet" air pistols and had a habit of taking potshots with them at other boys.

A 19-year-old neighbour said: "My parents know his parents and asked me to play with him because he had no friends.

"He always shot at us with the airsoft pistol. He wouldn't stop. It really hurt.

Because of that, we didn't want to play with him any more."

After leaving school, Kretschmer went to college to study sales. But his family knew he was having mental problems.

He was treated for depression last year and visited a psychiatrist five times. The treatment was due to continue at another clinic but Kretschmer stopped showing up for his appointments.

A youngster who knew Kretschmer said he wrote a letter to his parents three weeks ago to tell them he "couldn't go on".

"He was teased by others, felt bullied," the child said. "He stored it all up."

Police said Kretschmer had a crush on one local girl, but "it didn't work out".

Kretschmer inherited his love of guns from his dad Joerg, a wealthy paper factory owner who kept a collection of weapons at home.

Most of the guns were locked away but Joerg kept the Beretta in his bedroom.

A young neighbour of Kretschmer said: "Tim wanted his father's Beretta more than anything."

Police said Joerg could be prosecuted for failing to keep the gun secure. One senior officer said: "Everything here points to negligence of the father."

Detectives were questioning Kretschmer's mum, Ute, yesterday.

Joerg is a gun club member and Kretschmer often went to the club's firing range for target practice.

Kretschmer fired the Beretta more than 60 times at the school, shooting all his victims in the head.

The first kids killed were still working at their desks when Kretschmer shot them down.

Police chief Ralf Michelfelder, who witnessed the aftermath of the massacre, said: "Children were sitting at their tables, with pencils still in their hands, their heads fallen over on the table."

At least seven kids were wounded.

One of them, Patrick Schneider, 15, told how Kretschmer walked into his German class at about 9.30am. He said: "He had a bulletproof vest on. I thought it was a joke. Then he opened fire.

"We flipped over the desks to duck behind for cover. I saw that I was hit - in the back, in the arm and in the cheek.

"Suddenly he was gone and we barricaded the door, and then I saw my classmate Chantal. She sat at the door, dead."

Chantal Schill, 16, was named yesterday as one of Kretschmer's victims, along with Jana Schober, 14, and a 16-year-old named only as Steffi.

As Germany struggled to take in the scale of the massacre, some of the survivors went to the school to lay flowers. The note on one bouquet asked simply: "Why."

Flags are flying at half mast at all government buildings and the nation's football stars will wear black armbands at the weekend's Bundesliga matches.

Police said the death toll would have been far higher if the school's head teacher had not used a coded warning to tell staff a gunman was on the loose.

The head broadcast a tannoy message: "Frau Koma is coming." "Koma" is "amok" backwards.

The system was put in place after a school shooting in the town of Erfurt in 2002, when an expelled 19-year-old pupil murdered 16 people.