Now on October 1, the 26-year-old Finn Joel Marin entered the high school building in Kuopio, about 330 kilometers northeast of Helsinki, with a saber and attacked. He killed a 23-year-old woman from Ukraine and injured nine other people. He was stopped by a shot from a police pistol.
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According to the public prosecutor, the motive for the man’s act was to try to instill fear in as many people as possible. According to her, he planned to attack the school he attended himself from 2017.
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The defendant himself stated during the interrogations that he wanted revenge at school for his unhappy and lonely life and for the bullying he was allegedly the victim of.
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Finland has experienced several attacks on schools in recent years. In 2013, a 16-year-old at a vocational school in Oulu seriously injured three classmates and a janitor with a knife.
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In 2008, a 22-year-old man also shot dead ten people at an apprenticeship school in Kauhajoki. The year before, an 18-year-old schoolboy had shot dead eight people at a school in Jokela. According to AFP, Marin said in court that he had been inspired by these previous cases when planning his crime in Kuopio.
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