Student kills several in Finnish school shooting

HELSINKI (Reuters) - A student shot dead several people at a vocational school in western Finland on Tuesday before shooting himself, local authorities said.

The death toll from the shooting, the second at a Finnish school in less than a year, remained unclear and there were conflicting media reports about whether the gunman had survived.

Kauhajoki Mayor Antti Rantakokko told Reuters the shooter had died but rescue squad coordinator Kari Saarinen said he was being transferred to Tampere hospital.

"Several are dead," said Rantakokko, adding he did not know the exact number. "The situation is over now."

The school, which calls itself the "Kauhajoki School of Hospitality," had 150 students and 40 teachers as of 2005, according to the official website.

A fire broke out at the school but was extinguished while local authorities said the evacuation of students and staff had been completed.

Rescue coordinator Saarinen, who is also chief physician at Seinajoki hospital, about 40 miles from Kauhajoki, said hospitals in the area were on full emergency alert.

He added that he was unsure about the number of victims, but believed there were several -- some wounded, some dead.

The shooting raised the specter of the killings at Finland's Jokela high school last year, where student Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse and the principal after broadcasting his intent with a video on YouTube.

Auvinen shot himself and died later of his injuries.

"This is very very depressing. We have only had some time since the Jokela case last November," Saarinen said.

Rantakokko said there were echoes of Jokela in the Kauhajoki incident.

"On the Internet there is some information, there are analogies to the Jokela case," he said.

A search of YouTube yielded four videos filmed by a user who calls himself Mr. Saari, who said he was 22 years old and lived in Kauhajoki. The videos, between 20 and 32 seconds long, show a man dressed in black or dark colours, firing a handgun at a shooting range.

The YouTube user's profile included the words: "And suddenly there was war and the mothers they screamed. For revenge and reprisals for another war."

The videos were taken offline soon after the shooting.

Finland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, ranking third after the United States and Yemen, according to a study last year by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

After the last shooting, the Finnish government took some steps to toughen gun regulations. On Tuesday, it held an emergency meeting of governing coalition party leaders.

Kauhajoki is a municipality of 14,000 people located in the province of Western Finland. The Kauhajoki vocational school teaches catering, tourism studies and home economics.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki, Brett Young and Sakari Suoninen. Additional reporting by John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa in Oslo, Elinor Schang, Simon Johnson, Bjorn Rundstrom, Anna Ringstrom and Sofia Hilden in Stockholm, Kim McLaughlin in Copenhagen; Editing by Dominic Evans).