Florida school shooting leaves 17 dead

At least 17 people were killed when a gunman opened fire inside a high school in Florida yesterday afternoon.

Police were called to Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland shortly before 3pm yesterday and arrested the alleged gunman about an hour later in the nearby town of Coral Springs.

Police have confirmed that 12 of the victims died inside the school. Three were found outside and two died later in hospital. Three people remain in critical condition.

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Video footage from inside the school showed students cowering on the floor of a classroom, screaming as loud gunfire came from the corridor outside.

Broward County sheriff Scott Israel said the suspect, identified as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, is a former student of the school who had been expelled for disciplinary reasons. He was armed with a single AR-15 style assault rifle and was carrying “countless magazines, multiple magazines,” Israel said.

The gunman set off a fire alarm in a corridor of the school building “to draw people out of classrooms and increase the number of casualties”, CNN reports.

One student told NBC News that Cruz was “a little bit off” and “troubled”, and sometimes joked that “he’d be the one to shoot up the school”.

Police say they have begun to look into websites and social media accounts that he had been using, and said the results are “very, very disturbing.”

The tragedy is the eighth deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, and “one of the worst-ever school massacres”, says The Guardian.