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The school

The Kauhajoki school shooting was a school shooting that occurred on 23 September 2008, at Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences in Kauhajoki, a city in Western Finland. The gunman, 22-year-old culinary arts student Matti Juhani Saari, shot and fatally injured ten people with a semi-automatic pistol, before shooting himself in the head. He died a few hours later in Tampere University Hospital. One woman was injured but was in a stable condition.

The shooting took place at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality, owned by the Seinäjoki Municipal Federation of Education. The facilities and campus were shared between the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and the Seinäjoki Vocational Education Centre - Sedu. Saari was a second-year student in a Bachelor of Hospitality Management degree programme.

The incident was the second school shooting in less than a year in Finland, the other being the Jokela school shooting in November 2007, in which nine people including the gunman were killed. Before that, only one other school shooting had taken place in the country's history, in Rauma in 1989, leaving two people dead.