BERLIN, March 13 (Xinhua) -- German police have denied earlier assumption that the 17-year-old gunman who killed 15 people and himself Wednesday at a German school had talked about his plan in an Internet chat room.
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Rescue teams and police forces stand in front of the Albertville school in Winnenden near Stuttgart, Germany, Wednesday, March 11, 2009. (Xinhua/AFP Photo) Photo Gallery>>> |
A local police spokesperson said late Thursday
evening that the previous assumption of the investigators turned out to be
wrong, local media reported.
Earlier, Heribet Recht, interior minister of Baden
Wuertemberg, said the teenager gunman had announced on the Internet that he
planned to "fry" his former school with his weapon because people did not take
him seriously.
Now police have found out that the posting was not
written on the computer of the teenager and was possibly written by someone else
after the shooting, German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported.
Local police and the Public Prosecution Service of
Stuttgart said they will hear the witnesses who claimed to have seen the posting
but the key question would be when the message was posted.
The authorities also noted that they had asked the
operator of the server in the United States for help in the investigation.
The chat room website itself, www.krautchan.net, is
currently not available, allegedly because of its limited capacity to handle the
current rush.
One day after the school shooting, German police
received several bomb and rampage threats which were also targeted at schools.
According to Erwin Hetger, Baden Wuertemberg state's
police chief, schools in southwestern cities of Pforzheim, Stuttgart, Ulm,
Freiburg, Metzingen and Esslingen are under heavy police observation.
On Thursday, a 22-year-old student was arrested by
police and given a suspended sentence of five months in prison for threatening
rampage at his vocational school in the eastern Germancity of Halberstadt.
The man's motive was to cancel classes under the
assumption that the school would close under police operation. He found himself
in the court only seven hours after he made the threat phone call, Spiegel
online reported.
A district court of Berlin on Thursday sentenced a
21-year-old to one week's detention. The man confessed that he threatened
violence on a social network site on the Internet in spring 2008.
Gunman in German school shooting
announces plan in advance on Internet
BERLIN, March 12 (Xinhua) -- The 17-year-old gunman
who went on a rampage in a German school and killed 15 people and himself
Wednesday had talked about his plan in an Internet chatroom hours before the
tragedy, officials said on Thursday.
Heribert Rech, Interior Minister of the southwestern
German state of Baden-Wuertemberg, told reporters that investigations have shown
that the teenager gunman had said in an Internet chatroom at about 2:45 a.m.
local time (0145 GMT) Wednesday that he planned to take weapon to his former
school to "fry" because people did not take him seriously. Fulll story
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An undated handout picture shows the Albertville school in southwestern German town of Winnenden near Stuttgart. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>> |