College gunman warned of attack online
A teenage gunman who injured three people at a college in Greece before killing himself had warned of the attack hours earlier in an internet posting, police said today.
Officers confirmed the man seen in the posting on a popular social networking site was the 19-year-old gunman.
A note included on the posting said he felt “nothing but rejection and contempt” for those around him. The posting included photographs of him posing with weapons.
He shot himself in the head after opening fire at the vocational training college in western Athens today and died in hospital several hours later.
Police and Health Ministry officials said an 18-year-old electronics student was shot in the chest and seriously wounded, and two other men, identified as a 23-year-old Greek man and a 47-year-old Albanian. suffered lesser injuries.
Although there have been cases of stabbings at Greek schools, the shooting is unprecedented.
“Such incidents are foreign to the Greek educational system,” said Deputy Education Minister Andreas Lykourentzos.
Police identified the gunman as an immigrant from the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia.
“He left a note saying he couldn’t take it any more,” said a police spokesman. “It seems his motive was revenge.”
Police said the youth had apparently planned to take more lives. One official quoted the one-and-a-half-page note as saying: “I will kill whoever I find in my way... and then take my own life. I was systematically slighted.”
The gunman shot his fellow student four times, and was armed with two handguns and 66 9mm bullets. A knife was also found in his bag.
Police said the gunman arrived at around 8.45am, 15 minutes after lessons had started at the state unemployment agency’s training college.
He shot the student victim on a staircase before running out. He then shot two workers at a nearby shop who tried to stop him, one in the leg and the other in the arm. Then he went to a park close to the school and shot himself in the head.
Fellow students described him as a lonely youth.
Last week, unknown gunmen shot and injured two policemen who stopped them for a routine check in Athens, while recently a gunman fired shots in an Athens hospital during a bank robbery.
