Brazil is reeling from a deadly school shooting attack carried out by two former students who were allegedly inspired by the 1998 Columbine massacre.
The pair opened fire at Raul Brasil school in the city of Suzano, near Sao Paulo, at around 9.30am local time yesterday, killing eight people including five teenagers, and wounding at least ten more. The killers then turned their weapons on themselves.
Officials have identified the gunmen as 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25. Both were former students at the school, which educates around 1,000 pupils aged from six to 18.
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CCTV footage of the attack shows Monteiro entering the school and immediately opening fire on a group of pupils in the hallway.
Castro “entered the school a few seconds later and put a crossbow and backpack on the floor”, says Reuters. “He then pulled out a hatchet and hacked at the bodies on the ground.”
As gunshots rang out, screaming pupils fled the school, with some scrambling over the playground walls and running down the streets shouting for help.
Police arrived on the scene about eight minutes after the shooting was first reported. They found the two suspects dead, along with the lifeless bodies of five male pupils aged between 15 and 17, and two school employees.
Shortly before the massacre, the gunmen also shot and killed Monteiro’s uncle at the car hire agency he owned, according to Brazilian newspaper O Globo. They then stole a vehicle, which they used to drive to the school.
Their motive for the massacre is still unclear, although early investigations indicate that Monteiro was the main instigator.
Speaking on condition on anonymity, an investigator told Reuters that the pair had spent more than a year planning the attack, which they “hoped would draw more attention than the Columbine massacre”.
Next month marks the 20-year anniversary of the atrocity at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two students gunned down 13 people before killing themselves.
Sao Paulo state police commander Marcelo Salles described this week’s seemingly copycat attack as “unspeakably brutal”.
Although Brazil has the highest homicide rate in the world, and gun crime is common, “shootings of this nature are not”, says the BBC.
Despite the wide availability of guns on the country’s black market, the last mass shooting in a school was in 2011, when a former pupil killed 12 people at a school in Rio de Janeiro.
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