New School Shooting Warning

German Police Close School After Internet Alert

Germany is getting jumpy about school shootings. Police on Tuesday closed the second school in two days after receiving an Internet warning about a possible rampage being planned there. They have cautiously sounded the all clear.

DPA

Around 100 police cordoned off the school in northwestern Germany.

German police shut a school in northwestern Germany on Tuesday after receiving warnings from Finnish authorities that a student may be planning a shooting there.

Police searched the school in the town of Kaarst after investigators in Finland, where a man killed eight at his school before committing suicide two weeks ago, a man killed eight at his school before committing suicide two weeks ago,came across an entry in an Internet chat room pointing to a possible attack on the German high school.

Police said the information was very vague but that the school had been shut before lessons began and would remain closed on Tuesday. "We are nevertheless taking the information very seriously," police spokesman Hans-Willi Arnold told German news television channel n-tv.

Around 100 police officers cordoned off the school in the early hours of Tuesday and sent home arriving pupils and teachers. One 12-year-old pupil told a reporter from Rheinische Post newspaper: "They sent us away and said there won't be any school today. Cool!"

Tuesday is the first anniversary of a school shooting in the German town of Elmsdetten, where a student wounded 37 before killing himself.

The police operation comes just one day after another German school was closed following warnings about students planning a shooting rampage there. Students at the school in Cologne had alerted the headmistress about a suspicious entry on a school Web site.

One 17-year-old student committed suicide after being questioned by police and an 18-year-old accomplice is undergoing psychiatric treatment. They had planned an attack on their school but it has since emerged that they had already given up their plan before the police questioned them.

Police are investigating a possible connection between the Kaarst and Cologne schools because they share the same name, Georg-Büchner Gymnasium.

Finnish investigators had alerted their colleagues in Germany after they read a conversation in an Internet chatroom between two people who had heard about an impending attack on the school in Kaarst. But German police said they had no concrete indications that an attack was being planned.

Separately, a vocational training college in the central German city of Göttingen was evacuated on Tuesday after the school received a bomb threat. Lesson resumed after no bomb was found. Police suspect the recent alerts may be hoaxes timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Elmsdetten shooting.

cro/dpa/Reuters