6 dead in shooting spree at Finnish shopping mall
Another random shooting in little Finland?! And another mass killing at a Helsinki area shopping mall?! Finland is known around the world for snow, Nokia, and now shooting sprees.
Do you still feel safe in Finland?? Of course you do, everyone is white, it must be safe. Ignorance is bliss.
But nevermind today’s attack, the shooter has a foreign name, so it’s not really a Finnish thing, it’s us foreigners.
UPDATE: It appears the shooter is the sixth dead, he appeared to have offed himself. Glad he did justice to his crimes, cause the Finnish courts would never have gave him justice, he’d be pardoned by the President aftter a few years, as is the custom.
UPDATE 2: Here’s an old interview with him…
A sad day. I feel terrible for all those involved. From Helsingin Sanomat…
Six people have been reported dead on Thursday morning in a shooting incident that took place at the Sello shopping mall in the Leppävaara district of Espoo.
Apparently a man in his early forties, whose identity is known to police, began shooting in the Prisma supermarket with a 9mm handgun at around 10 a.m. Police named the suspect as Ibrahim Shkupolli.First reports indicated that three men and one woman were killed. A fifth victim was later found at a private apartment in Leppävaara, and is believed to be the gunman’s 42-year-old ex-girlfriend.
She was employed at the Prisma supermarket in Sello, and is thought to have been the primary target.
A restraining order had earlier been imposed on Shkupolli with regard to this woman.The search continued for the gunman, and his body was eventually found a couple of hours later at an apartment in the Suvela district of Espoo. Indications are that he shot himself.
All of the victims at Sello were apparently members of the sales staff. One man was shot twice in the head. A woman was shot in the stomach and two other men were shot on a different floor of the mall complex, one of the largest in the Greater Helsinki area.
The male victims in the mall were born in 1969, 1975, and 1982. The woman was born in 1964.
No further details were given of other casualties.The mall was emptied and police continued the search for the gunman in the shopping centre and the surrounding area, before extending the net to known addresses, where the man’s body was eventually discovered.
Prisma store staff and witnesses were taken to the public library on the premises.
The police held a press conference on the matter at 14:30, after a photograph of the suspect had been released to the media before the man was found dead.
Police had warned Shkupolli was armed and dangerous. He had previous convictions for firearms offences in 2004 and 2007.
Numerous police vehicles and ambulances attended the scene, and for some hours commuter trains were not stopping at Leppävaara station.Police were not particularly forthcoming with details of the killings, or of whether others were hit by gunfire, but the impression given was that the primary target was the 42-year-old woman, and it is known that those killed in the shopping mall were her colleagues.
Whilst no specific reason has been given for why they were singled out by the gunman, the indications are that this horrible tragedy was not a “shooting-spree” killing of the kind that has made Finland internationally known in the past two years, following school massacres in Jokela and Kauhajoki by disaffected teenage pupils.
Nonetheless, it will inevitably reopen old wounds and will prompt further discussion on the large number of handguns owned in this country and on the tightening of restrictions on access to firearms.
