Panic grips Finnish school in copy-cat gun scare

By Sakari Suoninen

KIRKKONUMMI, Finland (Reuters) - Panic swept a school in southern Finland on Friday after an online threat that it would be the next target for a shooting rampage, the school's principal said.

Two days earlier, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot dead six fellow students and two staff members at a school in nearby Tuusula, in a massacre foreshadowed by the gunman in online postings in the days and hours before the shooting.

The Finnish government said it would toughen regulations on gun ownership by those aged under 18.

"Yesterday there was a threat on the Internet ... someone posted a note with the username 'Sturmgeist', saying that the next target would be a Kirkkonummi middle school," Maarit Rossi, principal of Kirkkoharju middle school in Kirkkonummi, said on Friday.

"One can imagine how the rumors spread when we have 1,300 pupils in the complex. This did not proceed calmly, there was panic," Rossi told Reuters.

Auvinen, who shot himself in the head after the rampage and died later of his injuries, used "Sturmgeist89" as his username on his postings on the YouTube Web site.

He began making postings on Monday indicating that he planned a massacre at his high school. The last was made less than an hour before the shootings, police said on Friday.

"Sturmgeist" means "storm spirit" in German.