The gunman, 22-year-old student Matti Juhani Saari, shot and killed ten people with a Walther P22 Target semi-automatic pistol, before shooting himself in the head.

[6][7] The shooting took place at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality, owned by the Seinäjoki Municipal Federation of Education.

The first similar incident in the country's history was the Raumanmeri school shooting in Rauma in 1989, leaving two people dead.

[1] Saari was armed with a .22 LR caliber Walther P22 Target semi-automatic firearm and homemade Molotov cocktails.

"[16] Saari initially opened fire on a group of students who were taking a business studies exam.

Saari then covered the classroom in a flammable liquid, believed to be petrol, and set the room alight.

[18] A further ten students were treated for minor injuries, including sprains and cuts from broken glass.

[11][19] A student in an adjacent classroom, Sanna Orpana, said that her class had heard "shooting and a kind of a rumble like tables falling down."

Saari shot at them, and the remaining students in Orpana's classroom hid under a table before running upstairs.

With a total of ten people killed, it was the deadliest peacetime attack in Finnish history, surpassing the previous highest count of eight in the Jokela school shooting.

It was the deadliest attack on a school campus since April 2007, when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people during the Virginia Tech shooting.

A police spokesperson commented: "Saari left notes saying he had a hatred for mankind, for the whole human race, and that he had been thinking about what he was going to do for years.

The friend said that around eighteen months before the incident, Saari had sent him a message saying that he would carry out a school shooting the next day.

[21] Finnish police were also investigating whether a copycat element was involved after it emerged that both Saari and Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the gunman in the Jokela shooting, had bought their guns from the same store.

Both exchanged videos related to school shootings on YouTube and Finnish social networking site IRC-Galleria.

Saari, a Hospitality Management student at the school,[36] was expelled from the Finnish Army in 2006 after serving for a month.

[35] Saari had a YouTube account where he uploaded videos of him firing a handgun at a local shooting range.

[41] A police inspector was subsequently charged with dereliction of duty, and his court case began in September 2009.

[13] The Chief Investigator of the case, Jari Neulaniemi, speculated that the cameraman may have been the friend of Saari's who was murdered.

When asked whether similar attacks could take place in the future, he replied: "I sadly fear it's possible.

"[31] On the day of the incident, a crisis meeting was held with government ministers, chairs of the parliamentary groups, and police officials.

[47] Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen described it as a "tragic day" and appealed for unity in the hope "that events like these will not happen again.

[49] Within days of the shooting, the police said that they had received a sizeable number of tip-offs alerting them to suspicious photographs, videos, and comments in chat rooms.

[50] Finnish media reported that several bomb threats and other threatening messages were circulating amongst students nationwide in the days after the shootings.