HELSINKI (Finland), Nov 7: An 18-year-old student at a school in Finland went on the rampage on Wednesday, shooting dead seven classmates and the headmistress and wounding a dozen others before turning his gun on himself.

Police said the teenage killer was in a “critical condition” in hospital after trying to commit suicide following his slaughter of five boys, two girls and the headmistress of Jokela high school, north of Helsinki.

Finnish President Tarja Halonen expressed her shock at the shooting, the worst in the country’s history.

“We have today received the shocking and sad news about a shooting incident in the Tuusula Jokela school. I send my heart-felt condolences to the families of the victims in the shooting incident,” she said.

“The toll is eight dead,” a police spokesman told reporters. “The gunman aimed his weapon at his head and fired. He’s at the Toeoeloe hospital in Helsinki. He’s in critical condition,” the spokesman added.

The rampage reportedly began at around midday (1000 GMT) inside a classroom at the secondary school of some 450 pupils.

“Suddenly people began running and shots were heard and began raining down,” student Miro Lukinmaa told the Iltalehti newspaper.

“I saw injured people lying in the corridor. We started to run and followed (the crowd) in panic. Everyone was trying to squeeze through a narrow door,” he said.

The shooting came after a video entitled “Jokela High School Massacre — 11/7/2007” was posted on the video-sharing website You Tube, reportedly some time in the past two weeks.

The video zooms in on the school with heavy metal music blaring in the background and shows a young man against a red background pointing a gun at the camera.

Within hours of the shooting, the video had been downloaded more than 200,000 times.

In his profile on You Tube, 18-year-old Sturmgeist89, who posted the video and has no confirmed links to the shooting, says: “I am prepared to fight and die for my cause.

“I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.” “You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand,” he added.

Sturmgeist89, who had most recently logged into his You Tube account on Wednesday morning, also posted videos hailing among others the perpetrators of school shootings in the United States and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Privately-run television station MTV3 reported the shooter had repeatedly expressed admiration for Hitler and Stalin.

There have been a number of stabbings at Finnish schools in recent years, but Wednesday’s was the first shooting since a 14-year-old shot dead two classmates in a school in the coastal city of Rauma in 1989.—AFP