Suspect detained. School shooting in Finland leaves several injured and one dead

At least one 12-year-old child died and two others were seriously injured in the shooting that occurred this morning at a school in Vantaa, which ended with the arrest of a suspect, also a minor, Finnish police said.

“There are injuries in the shooting. The suspect is in police custody”initially said the Finnish police, who were called to the scene of the shooting at 9:08 am local time (7:08 am in Lisbon), and said at the time that there were three injured and that the suspect, also a minor, had been detained.

According to the Spanish agency Efe, Among the injured were at least three minors and the suspect, who has since been detained by authorities, was also a minor. The injured were taken to the hospital, one of whom died shortly afterwards.

The motivations for this attack are not yet known.

Both the three victims and the suspect in the attack are around 12 years old, according to Reuters.

“The danger ended immediately,” school principal Sari Laasila told Reuters, declining to comment further on the incident.

Authorities asked residents of the area not to open their doors to strangers and to stay away from the school area. The establishment where the shooting occurred is a primary school, attended daily by around 800 students and where 90 people work.

Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo called the incident “deeply shocking.”

“The day started in a horrible way. There was a shooting at the Viertola school in Vantaa. I can only imagine the pain and worry that many families are facing right now. The suspect in the crime has been arrested”the Minister of the Interior, Mari Rantanen, reacted on the social network X.

Vantaa’s deputy director of education and training, Katri Kalske, reported that a crisis office has already been convened and explained that any update on the incident is the responsibility of the police, according to the Finnish channel Yle.

Vantaa is the fourth largest city in Finland, with around 240 thousand inhabitants.This is not the first time that incidents of this kind have been recorded in the country. Previous school shootings have led the Government to take stricter measures regarding gun ownership.

In 2007, Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot dead six students, the school nurse, the principal and himself with a gun at Jokela High School, near Helsinki. A year later, Matti Saari, another student, opened fire at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, located in northwestern Finland, killing nine students and a male staff member before turning the gun on himself.

Finland strengthened weapons legislation in 2010, introducing an aptitude test for all applicants for firearms licenses. The age limit for candidates has also been changed from 18 to 20 years..

There are more than 1.5 million licensed firearms and about 430,000 license holders in the country of 5.6 million people, where hunting and target shooting are popular activities.

w/agencies