Police actions to be examined in detail
Police spoke to killer on Monday, but did not revoke firearms licence or confiscate gun
Police interviewed the suspected Kauhajoki gunman Matti Juhani Saari on Monday, because they had been made aware by a member of the public of videos Saari had placed on the YouTube website.
The questioning did not lead to any further action, and on Tuesday the Minister of the Interior Anne Holmlund (National Coalition Party) and the Chief of Police Mikko Paatero promised a comprehensive inquiry into why the suspect was not relieved of his gun on Monday.
The following day, Saari caused a bloodbath at a vocational college in Kauhajoki that left ten others dead before he shot himself in the head. Saari later died of his injuries in hospital in Tampere.
He is also believed to have caused a number of fires in the school, some of which extinguished themselves.
Some of the victims died in the hail of bullets from Saari's Walther P22 pistol, but others apparently were asphyxiated by the smoke and toxic gases given off by the fire.
Some of the victims were so badly burned that identification has not yet been possible.
The suspect Matti Saari applied for a licence for his .22 calibre pistol from the Kauhajoki police station in the summer.
He was interviewed, and thereafter was given a temporary one-year firearms permit.
According to Deputy Police Chief Vesa Nyrhinen of the Seinäjoki Police Department, this is standard operating procedure in such cases.
The grounds for granting the licence were Saari's professed hobby of target shooting. On Monday he was interviewed again by the same officer who had issued the licence in August.
Nyrhinen stated on Tuesday that there was no single specific reason why the permit was not revoked, but that investigations were going on into whether the officer acted correctly.
Interior Minister Holmlund would not comment on the police actions on Tuesday, as the investigations were still ongoing.
It was unclear, for example, whether the police in Kauhajoki were aware of all the material relating to the suspect that was subsequently found from the Internet.
Some images on sites other than YouTube were of a conspicuously more threatening nature than the video of the suspect firing his pistol on a shooting range.
One significant detail that has since come to light is that Saari filmed three of the more "damaging" and threatening images of himself - pointing a gun at the camera - only after his interview with the police, on Monday evening. They were posted up on the Net shortly before the killing spree started.
The question of whether the shooting would not have taken place on Tuesday had the police acted differently is impossible to answer, in the view of Chief of Police Paatero, who pointed out that we cannot know whether the suspect had alternative plans that he might have carried out if the gun had been taken from him.
Paatero called for a greater degree of surveillance and control of the Internet, and said he was willing to deploy greater police resources to this end.
Helsingin Sanomat
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| 24.9.2008 - TODAY |
 Police actions to be examined in detail |
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