UPDATED, 19:00: Saari copied Jokela killer Pekka-Eric Auvinen in everything he did

Kauhajoki killings appear to be in many respects a copycat image of Jokela High School massacre in 2007

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Yesterday’s shooting spree in Kauhajoki bears remarkable and highly disturbing similarities to last year’s Jokela High School shooting incident in Tuusula.
      Last November an 18-year-old local upper secondary school student Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot dead six students, a school nurse, and the headmaster in the middle of a school day. In the end Auvinen shot himself in the head in the school lavatory. He succumbed to his injuries in Helsinki’s Töölö Hospital the same night at 22:14.
     
In Kauhajoki, the 22-year-old Matti Juhani Saari also targeted his own school with his attack. Just like Auvinen, he entered the school in the morning with a big black bag, moved through the school hallways with a handgun, and eventually shot himself in the head.
      Both Saari and Auvinen had firearm certificates for 22-calibre handguns. Auvinen used a Sig Sauer Mosquito semi-automatic pistol. Saari’s weapon looks to have been a Walther P22. For both men the gun was their first, and last.
     
Both men had also uploaded videos and pictures of themselves on the Internet.
      Saari’s Internet files and profiles are nearly identical to those of Auvinen. In the videos the shooter shows off his handgun and fires it outdoors. In the photos the shooter poses defiantly with his weapon and points it straight at the camera. Both men had photo-manipulated one of the images so that it was red and black.
      The men’s appearance and their style of dress is also eerily similar. Both have blond hair that is combed back, and they both wear a black leather jacket or a dress shirt.
     
On the morning of the shooting, both men’s actions were uncanningly alike. Both Auvinen and Saari updated their Net profiles within hours of going out and killing several people.
      Auvinen wrote his last comments online and put the finishing touches to his suicide note - his manifesto - half an hour before commencing the shooting in the Jokela school at 11:42.
      Saari looks to have uploaded three more pictures to the Irc-Galleria networking site on Tuesday morning at 10:15. About half an hour later, he started his killing spree.
      Pekka-Eric Auvinen tried to set the Jokela school on fire, but failed in his attempts. On Tuesday there was a fire at the Kauhajoki School of Food Management, apparently started by Saari with a number of Molotov cocktail-style bottle bombs.
     
The Jokela killer did well in school, but was described as “weird” by friends close to him. Auvinen had been prescribed anti-depressant drugs, but because of patient queues was not directed to see a psychiatrist. Auvinen exhibited interest in extremist movements.
      In Matti Saari’s net profile there are also signs of misanthropy. For one, Saari listed “misanthropy and freedom” as his philosophies of life. Wikipedia describes misanthropy as general dislike, distrust, or hatred of the human species.
     
     
Updated 18:00
     
A new point of contact between the two killers has come to light.
      According to the Swedish-language daily Hufvudstadsbladet, Saari bought his Walther pistol from the same store in Jokela that had supplied Auvinen with his own Sig Sauer semi-automatic.
     
A police spokesman confirmed to the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that the gun in Saari's case had been purchased from "the Jokela area", and did not deny as much to Helsingin Sanomat, while pointing out that pursuing the purchase of a legal gun from a registered gunsmith is not high on the police agenda when they have ten murders on their hands.
     
Nevertheless, it adds to the pattern of apparently apeing the actions of another disturbed young man, and only consolidates the forlorn image of someone seeking notoriety through drastic and merciless action, even as it casts some doubt on Saari's claims that he had been planning the killing for six years.
      Kauhajoki is approximately 320 km from Jokela.
     
The Jokela High School killings were naturally reported extensively at the time. Rather than a long list of individual links, readers are asked to click on the Archives for November 2007 and scroll down through the various stories. The incident took place on 7.11.2008. A similarly numbing tragedy in Finland's recent past was the Myyrmanni shopping mall bombing of October 11th, 2002. A link to the Archives for that month is also provided.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Gunman and eight others die in school shooting spree (8.11.2007)

See also:
  IntEd Archives, November 2007 (Jokela)
  HS Inted Archives, October 2002 (Myyrmanni)

Helsingin Sanomat