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ERFURT, Germany (Reuters) - A student bent on bloody revenge after being expelled from his school has shot dead 17 people, mostly teachers, before killing himself in the worst murder spree in postwar Germany.
Armed with a pump-action shotgun and a handgun, the 19-year-old man, masked and clad in black, walked calmly through the Gutenberg high school in the eastern town of Erfurt, pumping bullets at teachers he found in the corridors and classrooms.
He killed 14 teachers, two pupils, a police officer and then himself. Six others were wounded on Friday.
The scale of the murder, rivalling some of the worst school killings in the world, stunned Germans, whose sense of security was upset just two weeks ago by the deaths of 11 German tourists in a bomb blast in Tunisia.
"Police called to the scene found a scene of horror. There were dead people in the corridors, in the classrooms, one was found in the toilet," a police spokesman said.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said he was staggered by the crime and cancelled an election campaign event planned for Saturday. Flags on the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin flew at half-mast.
"This is so unique that it exceeds one's powers of imagination. I think we all need time to work this through in our minds," Schroeder told reporters. "There are questions here that we have to answer as a whole society."
The killer, who has not been named, was expelled from the school several months ago and banned from taking his "Abitur", a high-school exam required for entry into university.
The drama began shortly before 11 a.m. (10 a.m. British time) when the school janitor rang police to report hearing shots in school.
TEACHERS THE TARGETS
"We were sitting in class doing our work and we heard a shooting sound," said Filip Niemann, a student who survived the bloodbath. "We joked about it and the teacher smiled."
"The teacher let us go out and see what was happening and when we left the classroom, three to four metres in front of us, there was a masked person in black holding his gun at his shoulder," said the teenager, visibly shocked and his voice trembling.
"He stretched out his gun and fired. We saw a teacher fall to the ground. We just turned and ran. I heard from other kids the gunmen opened classroom doors and aimed at teachers."
"The pupils ran out of the classroom and he came after us and shot a teacher next to me," one girl, who was not named, told German radio. "He looked deep into my eyes."
One of two police officers who arrived at the school after the janitor's phone call was immediately shot dead, police said.
Police had earlier spoken of two gunmen, but later said they believed the student had been acting alone. Local media reported witnesses had spoken of a second gunman and police were checking reports he may have slipped out of the building among other students during the chaos of the evacuation.
They were also reportedly checking the plumbing of the building for any trace of a second assailant.
All flags in Erfurt were at half-mast and the town's community gathered on Friday night at the central Andreas church for an ecumenical ceremony of mourning. Church bells rang across town.
TRAPPED FOR HOURS
About 700 students between the ages of 10 and 19 attend the imposing early 20th-century Jugendstil building.
Some were trapped in classrooms for hours, too terrified to leave as the gunman roamed. A piece of paper reading "Help" appeared on an upper floor window during the afternoon.
Armed police found the gunman dead in a room after combing the corridors for several hours.
Other mass killings at schools in recent years include the 1996 murder of 16 children and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane by a lone gunman who later killed himself.
In April 1999 in the United States, two student gunmen killed 12 other students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Both events caused soul-searching in Britain and America about a loss of moral values and insufficient gun laws.
The shock of the murder is deep in Germany, where generations have grown used to a life of peace, prosperity and physical safety after the horrors of World War Two.
Interior Minister Otto Schily said: "We have to ask ourselves what is wrong with society where such a young person causes such calamity and acts with such aggression.
"This student seems to have had such hatred because he was expelled and couldn't sit his exam that he was driven to this terrible deed."
Schily said it was macabre coincidence that the German parliament had on Friday passed a gun control law tightening rules on ownership.
Germany already has strict laws governing the right to a gun, but experts say the country is awash with illegal weapons smuggled into the country from eastern Europe and the Balkans.
"Even if I believed in God, I would not believe in him any more, How could he let something like this happen?" asked student survivor Niemann. "What I have seen today will stay with me for the rest of my life."
http://www.reuters.co.uk/news_artic...BAEZSFFAKEEATIIWD?type=topnews&StoryID=889076
