a 12 year old dies –

One of the children involved in a shooting at an elementary school in Vantaa, on the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland, has died. All the boys in the case, including the one who shot and who was stopped, are 12 years old. The Viertola school in Vantaa, Finland’s fourth largest city, has around 800 pupils and 90 staff. It is attended by children between seven and fifteen years old. The students’ parents said the shooting occurred in a classroom. A witness told the Iltalehti newspaper that the shots also echoed in the school courtyard: «At first I didn’t understand that it was a weapon. Then a terrible scream was heard and the children ran across the courtyard.”

The police explained that the boy who fired the shots initially ran away but was stopped shortly afterwards in a “quiet manner” on the other side of the river. Iltalehti posted a video shot from a passing car showing two police officers stopping a teenager on the side of a road in a residential area. For hours the police kept everyone away from the school, inviting people to stay indoors. Then, around noon local time, he let in the parents who were waiting outside the school to collect their children. Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said he was “deeply shocked”. The day began in a “shocking” way, said Interior Minister Mari Rantanen in a post on X: “I can only imagine the pain and worry that many families are experiencing at this moment.”

Finland was the scene of two gruesome school shootings in the early 2000s: in November 2007, an 18-year-old opened fire at a secondary school in Jokela, about 50 kilometers north of Helsinki, killing the principal and the nurse together with six students, before committing suicide. The following year, in September 2008, there was a shooting at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, carried out by 22-year-old Matti Juhani Saari, which caused 11 victims. Since then, hundreds of schools have received shooting threats, as documented by an article published in the Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention: the article cited mental health problems as the main reason for the phenomenon.