A 12-year-old has been detained after he opened fire at a school north of the Finnish capital, Helsinki, killing one pupil and badly wounding two others.
The Viertola school in Vantaa, Finland's fourth-largest city, has around 90 staff members and 800 students in classes one through nine, ages seven to fifteen.
"Today, after 9:00 a.m., a shooting incident occurred at a school... in which a sixth grader, a student of the school, died," Ilkka Koskimaki, chief of the Eastern Uusimaa police department, said at a press conference, adding that two others were "seriously injured."
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Police had previously said that both the suspect and the injured were 12 years old. They've started an inquiry into murder and attempted murder.
The child who was shot died at the scene, and the suspect had already fled the school when police arrived.
The suspect, who was carrying a gun, was captured in a "calm manner" at about 10 a.m. and acknowledged to be the shooter during a preliminary interrogation.
The Iltalehti Daily published a video recorded from a passing automobile showing two police officers holding down a toddler on the side of a road in a residential area.
Due to the suspect's young age, police stated that the youngster would not be detained in prison but would be given over to social services after being interrogated.
In the early 2000s, Finland saw two devastating school shootings.
In November 2007, an 18-year-old man opened fire on a secondary school in Jokela, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Helsinki, killing the headmaster, a nurse, and six pupils before turning the pistol on himself.
A year later, in September 2008, 22-year-old Matti Juhani Saari murdered 11 people at a vocational school in the western town of Kauhajoki.
Hundreds of schools have since received shooting threats, according to an article published in the Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention.
