Fear in Finland, shooting in a school: one dead. The person responsible has been arrested

Fear in Finland, shooting in a school: one dead. The person responsible has been arrested

A shootout it happened in one school of Vantaa, a city not far from Helsinki located in southern Finland. According to police, the suspect perpetrator of the shooting was arrested, and would be 12 years old like the victims. One of them died, the police reported. Authorities urged citizens to stay away from school and not open the doors of their homes to strangers.

Finland: Prime Minister deeply shocked by school shooting

In recent decades, Finland has been the scene of two major school shootings. In November 2007, an 18-year-old student armed with a semi-automatic pistol opened fire at Jokela High School in Tuusula, southern Finland, killing 9 people, and was later found dead with self-inflicted wounds. Less than a year later, in September 2008, a 22-year-old student shot and killed 10 people with a semi-automatic pistol at a vocational college in Kauhajoki, southwestern Finland, before turning the gun on himself and killing himself . In the country, which has 5.6 million inhabitants, there are more than 1.5 million licensed firearms and around 430,000 license holders, according to the Finnish Ministry of the Interior. Hunting and owning firearms have a long tradition in the sparsely populated Northern European country. The responsibility for granting permits for ordinary firearms lies with local police departments. Following school shootings in 2007 and 2008, Finland tightened its gun laws, raising the minimum age for firearms ownership and giving the police greater powers to carry out background checks on individuals applying for a firearms licence.