TUUSULA (Finland): Alarm in Finland over this week’s high school massacre was heightened on Friday by Internet threats of further attacks that prompted police to surround two more schools.

Police blocked all access to the Hyrylae middle-secondary school in the small town of Tuusula after discovering a specific threat posted on video-sharing site YouTube.

Another nearby school, in the town of Kirkkonumi to the west of Helsinki, was also briefly put on high alert due to a similar posting.

In both cases, police later lifted the threat warning, but many anxious parents chose to remove their children for the remainder of the day.

The jitters were caused by the fact that Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, had posted a video threat on YouTube before carrying out his murderous rampage on Wednesday, when he shot dead eight people at the Jokela High School in Tuusula before killing himself. Police on Friday said Auvinen had created the Internet material two days before his attack, during which he peppered hallways and classrooms with 69 bullets.

“The last time he handled his files was on Nov 7, 2007 at 11:08am (0908 GMT), just before the incident,” police said in a statement.

When Auvinen’s 20-minute shooting rampage, which began at 11:43am, was over, five boys aged between 16 and 18, the 61-year-old headmistress, a 42-year-old female nurse and a 25-year-old single mother taking an adult training class at the school were dead.

They all had multiple gunshot wounds to the head and upper body, police said, adding that one person had been shot 20 times and the headmistress had received seven bullets.

“I don’t want this to be called only as ‘school shooting’,” Auvinen said in his last YouTube entry before the massacre, which appears to have been planned to coincide with the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

The blond, broad-shouldered youth, who was fascinated by extreme, nihilist philosophies and was an admirer of Hitler and Stalin, had stopped taking anti-depressants just days before the killings, according to an Internet exchange he had with a Danish friend on Tuesday.

The conversation is still visible but its authenticity has yet to be confirmed.—AFP