SHE portrays herself on the internet as a willowy blonde “atheist immortalist” whose favourite films include Natural Born Killers and Kill Bill. Yesterday she acknowledged that she had been the girlfriend of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the 18-year-old Finnish student who last week launched a murderous assault on his classmates and teachers at Jokela high school, 30 miles from Helsinki.

Yet the woman who calls herself Tana Scheel online rejected suggestions that the recent break-up of their relationship may have ignited Auvinen’s killing spree. Five pupils and three adults died when he walked into the school last Wednesday and opened fire with a .22 calibre pistol.

“I have received lots of mail and messages saying that it was my fault and that I am a murderer who abetted him,” she said. On her YouTube video page she added: “Many people are rejected without then going out and committing murder. He was not crazy and this is not about me . . . stop trying to sensationalise a story.”

Yet some of the YouTube users who had been following Auvinen’s online activities remained convinced that the collapse of his relationship with Scheel, who lives in Denmark, was the trigger that turned his wild political rantings into a plan to wreak havoc in his home town of Tuusula.

“After his girlfriend left him, he lost it and decided he was going to live out his little testosterone fantasy,” said a YouTube user who is known as The Amazing Atheist and who had engaged Auvinen in a vicious online argument before reporting his threats of violence to YouTube administrators.

“He was just a pathetic f***ing teenager who had no idea about right and wrong at the time,” Atheist added. “He was too f***ed up to understand the consequences of his actions.”

When Auvinen first began to post his video rantings in both English and Finnish on websites earlier this year, he found an appreciative audience of disillusioned young people who shared his bitter views about the failings of society and the need for revolution.

But not everyone applauded Auvinen’s hate-filled videos, in which he declared that, “I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit.” He may have been unprepared for the virulence of the counterattack, led by Atheist, a 22-year-old American.

In a blistering 11-minute video rebuttal of Auvinen’s barely coherent posturing, Atheist dismissed the teenaged Finn, who was using the online name NaturalSelector89, as “a sub-par human . . . a whining bitch . . . and a total misanthropic douchebag”. Last week Atheist posted a new commentary on the Jokela shootings, entitled: “I knew this would happen.”

As Finland struggled to comprehend the crime, investigators around the world were recoiling last week from the prospect of having to sift through countless examples of internet extremism in the hope of identifying the tiny minority whose threats may become real.

“It is completely impossible for us to go through all the chat groups, blogs and websites, since there are so many of them,” said Sergeant Jukka Makynen of the Finnish police.

Even when Auvinen was barred from using his NaturalSelector name on YouTube – apparently because his threats of violence breached the website’s rules of conduct – he rejoined under another name, Sturmgeist89.

Auvinen was part of a nihilistic group of so-called “social Darwinists” who believe that the Darwinian concept of natural selection should be applied on a societal scale – that strong societies should eliminate the weak. His videos were usually accompanied by pictures of Nazis, antisemitic slogans and references to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. He had 300 YouTube subscribers – people who would automatically be notified whenever he posted a new video.

There were also indications that Auvinen had internet contacts with Dillon Cossey, 14, an American boy who was arrested last month on suspicion of planning an armed assault on his former school, Plymouth White-marsh, near Philadelphia.

Police believe both youths may have belonged to both a social Darwinist internet group and a second group dedicated to the memory of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 12 students and a teacher at Columbine high school in Colorado. Several of the larger Colum-bine-related groups are routinely monitored by US agents for hints of copycat plots.

The day before he attacked Jokela, Auvinen posted a new video detailing his plans. “I have no mercy for the scum of the earth, the pathetic human race,” he wrote. He also sent a personal message to Atheist, apologising for their past hostilities.

“Basically I had ripped him apart,” said Atheist. “When that message arrived I really didn’t know what to make of it.” Less than 24 hours later, Atheist heard the news.

Last Wednesday morning Auvinen played a last round of Battlefield 2, his favourite online game in which, after accumulating 183 hours of play, he had achieved 9,475 “kills” and 234 “suicides”.

He then walked to Jokela high school, where he fired 69 bullets, seven of them at his former headmis-tress, Helena Kalmi, 61. Witnesses said the two may have argued the day before; he forced her to kneel in the schoolyard before shooting her.

Moments before, Kalmi had issued the chilling warning to her 500 pupils: “Get into your classrooms immediately, lock the doors and hide.”

His other victims included five students between 16 and 18 who may have been chosen at random. A 42-year-old school nurse and a 25-year-old single mother taking an adult class also died. At one point he walked into a class of younger children, shouted, “Revolution, smash everything,” then shot at a window and the television and left without hurting anyone.

When police arrived, Auvinen shot himself in the head. He died in hospital 10 hours later.

The normality of Auvinen’s life belied the dark fantasies he played out online. Jokela is a village with few social problems, a quiet place in which to bring up a family. The family’s yellow clapboard bungalow, now guarded by police, has its curtains tightly closed but three bikes lying in the garden suggest quiet suburban normality.

Police investigators described him as from “a very normal family . . . he had no problems at school” – his father Ismo has worked on the Finnish railways for decades and is a guitarist in rock bands in which his wife Mikaela is a singer.

But there were clues. Police described Auvinen as “angry and lonely”. He seemed to have few friends and on his killing spree five of his victims were boys aged 16 to 18 – but he did not shoot at girls or younger pupils when he entered their classrooms.

His internet postings suggest an unhappy adolescent who felt that an act of supreme, nihilistic violence would free him from his misery and win him the accolade of fame, at least among the devotees who followed his ramblings online. “I used to believe in humanity and I wanted to live a long and happy life,” he wrote.

“You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand . . . You will probably say I am ‘insane’, ‘crazy’, ‘psychopath’, ‘criminal’ or crap like that. No . . . This is my war, my ideas and my plans. Don’t blame anyone else for my actions than myself. Don’t blame my parents or my friends. I told nobody about my plans and I always kept them inside my mind only.

“Don’t blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read.”

Jokela seems destined to take its place alongside Dunblane and Columbine as part of the price society pays for a worldwide enthusiasm for guns. Auvinen may remain an enigma – it may never be possible wholly to explain whether his outpouring of violence was triggered by online adolescent fantasies, his fascination with previous school shootings, or simply a teenager’s unfathomable misery at being dumped by a beautiful girlfriend.

“He was another one of those poor little picked-on morons who decided to go to school and shoot up his classmates,” said Atheist. “It was something I warned would happen.”

Auvinen's YouTube page

Reuters' report on the shooting

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