School Shooting Concerns

Police decided to shut down the Georg Büchner High School, located near the western German city of Düsseldorf, after colleagues in Finland discovered an exchange on an Internet chat room in which users described hearing about possible plans for a massacre.

Police spokesman Hans-Willi Arnold told the dpa news agency that there was no concrete evidence about a student preparing to run amok and that the school closure was purely precautionary.

"Nonetheless, we're still taking these indications very seriously," Arnold told the German television news station n-tv.

Police also searched the school building and gave the all-clear.

"The search has been concluded, and there was no evidence of anything out of the ordinary," Arnold told the AFP news agency.

Fears of fatal role models

Authorities are particularly concerned because of the prevalence of school rampages in the headlines recently.

"You always have to take account of the possibility of copycat incidents," Arnold told dpa.

Last week, police in Cologne said they had foiled plans by two students to go on a rampage in a school also named after the writer Georg Büchner. Authorities said that the suspects -- one of whom committed suicide -- were in possession of crossbows, arrows and air rifles.

On Nov. 7, a student in the Finnish town of Tuusula ran amok with a .22 caliber handgun, killing eight people before taking his own life.

And Nov. 20 marks the one-year anniversary of a rampage in the western German town of Emsdetten in which an armed student wounded 37 people before killing himself.

Germany's worst rampage happened in April 2002, when a student named Robert Steinhäuser stormed a school in the city of Erfurt and began shooting. Sixteen people died in the massacre, which shocked the country and led authorities to concentrate more on preventative measures.

Police policy debate

But in the wake of the events in Cologne last weekend, some have criticized the police for being too pre-emptive.

"The investigators [in Cologne] wanted to show the public some quick results," police psychologist Georg Sieber told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "If they had been primarily concerned about the young man [who committed suicide], they would have reacted differently."

But police representatives point out the inherent difficulty of deciding whether plans for massacres are intended seriously or not.

"Investigators are of course under enormous pressure whenever plans for an attack are announced on the Internet," Rolf Kassauer, the head of the Berlin division of the Association of German Criminologists, told the newsmagazine Der Spiegel's Web site. "There's no way of knowing in advance whether someone has abandoned his plans or not."