Matti Juhani Saari

Before that, only one other school shooting had taken place in the country's history, in Rauma in 1989, leaving two people dead.

Matti Saari entered through the school buildings via the basement.

The shooting began in a classroom at around 10:40 (UTC+3), when roughly 200 people were assembled inside the college.

The emergency services received their first call at 10:46, after Saari stopped shooting in the classroom.

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

He wore dark clothing including a leather jacket.

The school's caretaker, Jukka Forsberg, who had several shots directed at him but survived, said "[The gunman] was very well prepared. He walked calmly."

Saari initially opened fire on a group of students taking a business studies exam, and entered at least one other classroom.

According to the three students who were able to escape from the exam room (there were roughly 20 students taking the exam), he had approached his victims individually before shooting them, acting aggressively.

Saari encountered little resistance and the massacre was concluded relatively quickly.

He left the exam room at least once during the shooting to reload in the hallway outside and, according to witnesses, the teacher unsuccessfully attempted to prevent him from returning and was killed as a result.

Nine victims died in the exam room and the tenth victim died in the hallway.

Another student was seriously wounded in the head but survived.

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

Some of the victims' bodies were damaged by the fire, making it more difficult to identify them.

Eight of the victims were female students, one a male student, and one a male member of staff.

All of the students killed were in their 20s, and the teacher was in his 50s.

A 21-year-old woman was shot in the head but had two operations in the days after sustaining her injury, and was reported as being in a satisfactory condition.

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

All the victims were classmates of Saari's.

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."

Orpana believed at the time that the noise may have been coming from a toy gun, and two other students went to investigate the noise.

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

At some point between 10:45–11:00 Saari ran down a corridor and threw a Molotov cocktail into a language laboratory.

He then shot out all of the windows in the school's main corridor, which extended through the building.

It was during this time that Saari also took aim at Forsberg.

A police van with two officers arrived a short time after the shootings began, at around 11:00.

They entered the yard of the college, where they were shot at by Saari and forced to retreat.

From around 11:45 to 12:00 further police units, bolstered by a number of armoured vehicles, began to arrive on the scene.

They attempted to enter the building through the main corridor, but this assault was aborted due to the black smoke that was emanating from within the building.

Meanwhile, having escaped the buildings in a variety of ways (including through doors and out of windows), some students found themselves impeded by a river that adjoined the school.

However, some were able to use rowing boats as a means of escape.

The incident was the second school shooting in less than a year in Finland, the other being the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, in which nine people including the gunman died.

The Kauhajoki school shooting occurred on 23 September 2008 at the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (SeAMK) in Kauhajoki, Finland.

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.

He died a few hours later at Tampere University Hospital.

One woman was injured but was in a stable condition.

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

The facilities and campus were shared between SeAMK and the Seinäjoki Vocational Education Centre – Sedu.

Saari was a second-year student in a Hospitality Management undergraduate degree programme.