ERFURT, German, 27 April — A failed former student, dressed in black and bent on revenge, yesterday shot dead 17 people, including 14 teachers, a policeman and two girl pupils in Germany’s worst school shooting.
The 19-year-old former pupil at the Johann Gutenberg grammar school, in the eastern city of Erfurt, later killed himself as police approached the classroom where he had locked himself, alone, after the rampage. The gunman went on a shooting rampage in the high school leaving a “picture of horror,” police said.
Nine male and five female teachers died in the massacre at the high school, police chief Manfred Grube said.
Grube said there were bodies lying in hallways, classrooms and a toilet at the school and that the gunman had killed himself as police approached.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the government viewed the massacre with “stunned horror,” a spokesman said.
Schroeder said he was “staggered” by the crime, and canceled an election campaign planned for today. “This rampage by an insane man has cost the lives of 18 people including himself,” said Manfred Scherer, state secretary for the state of Thuringia, of which Erfurt is the capital.
“This act surpasses anything that the state of Thuringia has ever experienced,” Scherer said.
It was the worst such incident of violence in Germany in decades. The shooting was the worst in Europe since the March 1996 rampage in Dunblane, Scotland, when a mentally-ill man shot dead 16 children and their teacher before turning his gun on himself. Grube said many students had fled the school and some had hidden under desks.
Police had searched the whole building and had not found a second assailant, despite reports that there were two attackers.
Police said the attack began as 700 students were sitting for end-of-year examinations. A student had reported that the attacker had said as a math examination was being handed out: “I’m not going to write anything” and then began shooting.
But Grube said the attacker was not taking part in the examinations. (The Independent).
