Police in Finland are investigating a possible link between the catering student who shot ten people on Tuesday and the teenage gunman who went on a rampage last November at a school near Helsinki.

Raising the spectre of a network of potential killers who swap ideas over the internet, Jari Neulaniemi, the head of the police investigation in the small rural town of Kauhajoki, said it was likely that the two disaffected young men had been in contact.

Mr Neulaniemi added that Matti Juhanni Saari bought his gun 11 months ago in the Helsinki suburb of Jokela, which was the scene of the previous school massacre in Finland.

Tuesday’s shooting horrified Finland and was seen widely as a carbon copy of the attack in Jokela, where Pekka-Erik Auvinen killed eight people. Both had placed videos of their intentions on YouTube shortly before their attacks, and both killed themselves with a shot to the head rather than face arrest.

Saari, 22, killed nine classmates and a male teacher 90 minutes into a business studies test that friends said he had also been due to take. He left notes suggesting that he had been preparing his attack since 2002.

Police said that most of his victims were burnt beyond recognition and might not be formally identified for weeks because Saari, who died in hospital later, set them alight with petrol bombs. Matti Vanhanen, the Finnish Prime Minister, has pledged to consider a ban on handguns.

As the small town of Kauhajoki began its search for answers, an independent prosecutor was appointed to investigate why police allowed Saari, a second-year catering student, to keep his Walther .22 handgun after questioning him on the eve of the killings about YouTube videos showing him practising his marksmanship. Local police insisted that they had not been aware of Saari’s more threatening videos, placed on a Finnish file-sharing site, in which he declared: “You will die next.”

The Interior Ministry ordered officers to monitor the internet more closely, suggesting that lessons had not been learnt from the Jokela massacre.

“The officer made his decision, he thought there was no reason to take the gun off him,” Urpo Lintala, a police spokesman said, adding that the officer was now on sick leave. “The only video we saw was where he was shooting at the range. It was only afterwards that much more information came out.”

Police sources later said that Saari, who came from Pyhäjärvi in northern Finland, was believed to have lost a younger brother in 2002, which may have left him disturbed.

A shrine of dozens of candles and poetic tributes to the dead built up opposite the entrance to the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality, a catering and tourism college at the heart of the the town of 14,000 inhabitants.

Joni Helminen, 21, a friend of Saari who lived in the same block of flats as the killer, described how he had finished the examination early and left Classroom 3 only minutes before Saari arrived. Mr Helminen said: “I was with him the night before it happened and we were talking about the exam. He seemed normal and there was no sign of anything. He spoke about having had to visit the police station that day because of videos he put on YouTube of himself firing a gun, but we did not talk much about that.

“The exam started at 9am and I wondered why Matti had not turned up. There were about 20 people in there, most of them women.”

Eight of the dead were women. Mr Helminen said that he used to go with Saari once a week to the shooting range shown in the videos.

He said: “Matti was smart and did well at school. He did go to parties but he was not a very sociable person. He once told me that he had been to see a psychologist, but he seemed the same afterwards as before.”

Other students were in a state of disbelief. Heidi Viittanen said: “My friend was in that classroom and I haven’t heard anything. I don’t know if she is dead or alive.”

Susanna Keranen, 19, said: “I knew he liked horror movies but I didn’t know he had a gun. They should have taken his licence away on Monday but they could not see behind the mask. It is hard to imagine that he could go to his own school and shoot his own classmates.”

She said that many students were scared to return to the college, which has been closed until Monday, after rumours that Saari had said that his attack would not be the last.

Tapio Varmola, the college principal, described Saari as a “silent young man” and said that nobody had any inkling about his plan. “I am very depressed at the moment,” he said. “He was a young man with two faces.”

Jukka Helin, a Navy chaplain drafted in to help grieving friends and families, said that the shootings had caused renewed soul-searching among Finns about their national character, especially whether some young men were too reserved and isolated.

“If you think about the nature of a Finn, you talk about a nation where people speak two different languages \ but remain silent,” he said.

“In Finland the extended family does not exist like it did and some people replace that with the internet.”

He added: “In twilight countries like Canada, Norway, Finland and Russia, it could be something to do with the darkness. There must be something about the northern culture.”

There was less understanding from Thomo Havunen, 60, a farmer who stopped with his friend outside the college, which was sealed off by police tape and guarded by troops as forensic experts came and went.

“Suicides are very usual in Finland. But why nowadays do they want to take other people with them?” Mr Havunen asked.

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