Kauhajoki school shooting
school shooting in Kauhajoki, Finland, on 23 September 2008
On 23 September 2008, a school shooting occurred at the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (SeAMK) in Kauhajoki, Finland. The gunman, 22-year-old student Matti Juhani Saari, shot and killed ten people with a Walther P22 Target semi-automatic pistol, with nine victims having been in a classroom and one in a hallway, before shooting himself in the head. He died a few hours later at Tampere University Hospital. Three were injured in the classroom after jumping out the window with one woman also having been shot in the head. Additionally, about 30 police officers were injured after inhaling smoke.
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 SeAMK and the Seinäjoki Vocational Education Centre – Sedu. Saari was a second-year student in a Hospitality Management undergraduate 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. The first similar incident in the country's history was the Raumanmeri school shooting in Rauma in 1989.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kauhajoki school shooting” as school shooting in Kauhajoki, Finland, on 23 September 2008. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q473889. Authority coordinates are 62.429, 22.181. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2007 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kauhajoki school shooting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.