Online warning 'was a fake'

A teenager who murdered 15 people , including nine pupils at his former school in southern Germany, shot one of his victims at a psychiatric clinic where he had been treated for depression, it emerged yesterday.

Tim Kretschmer was supposed to attend appointments at the clinic in Winnenden but broke off the treatment. On Wednesday he killed a man, thought to be a gardener, outside the clinic minutes after he used his father’s Beretta pistol to murder nine students, eight of them girls, and three teachers.

He then commandeered a car, held a gun to the head of his 41-year old hostage and asked him: “Should I have fun and pick off some more drivers?” He went on to kill two more people at a car showroom in the nearby town of Wendlingen before committing suicide.

Investigators were still struggling yesterday to understand the motives of a teenager whose obsession with fictional violence might have contributed to the all too real blood-bath that has shattered the normally quiet town in which he grew up.

Detectives who seized Kretschmer’s home computer discovered violent video games and pornography. Friends said that he regularly played the computer game Counter Strike and had become increasingly fascinated with horror films. His parents insisted, however, that Kretschmer also liked comedies and action films.

He attended a psychiatric clinic in Weissenhoff five times between April and September last year before his care was transferred to the centre in Winnenden and he broke off treatment.

At the Albertville school in Winnenden flags flew at half mast yesterday as hundreds of people took flowers, candles and notes of condolence to lay at the gates. Groups of people stood weeping and hugging each other as the full horror of the attack became clear.

Julia, 13, a pupil at Albertville who was in the classroom adjacent to the one where Kretschmer began his killing spree, relived her fear as she stood at the closed school gates with her friends: “I heard noises. I thought it was the janitor at first,” she told The Times. “Then children came in from other classes and it was clear it was something terrible. They got down on the floor. There were lots of people crying.”

She, like many others, was shepherded by police to the safety of the nearby swimming hall. Eight teenage girls, one boy and three teachers at the school were not so lucky. Last night Bild, the biggest German tabloid, named the only boy killed at the school as Ibrahim Yeniay, who was of Albanian origin.

Serkan Esen knew Ibrahim and described him simply as “a nice guy” who was 16 years old. “I was really shocked when I heard he had died,” he said quietly. Serkan was at his own school, the Scholl Brothers Realschule, when the attack began at Albertville. Referring to a code that teachers in the region have been trained to use in case of a school shooting, he said: “The school director said through the intercom: ‘Fraü Koma is coming’.

“I didn’t know what it meant but the teacher did and they locked the classroom door.” Koma is the reverse of the word amok. In December 2006, police trained all school principals in the area on how to respond to a shooting and advised them to have a warning code.

As news of Wednesday’s murders spread around Winnenden, the code went out around other schools. At Albertville, police think, events moved too fast.

Siegfried Mahler, a Stuttgart prosecutor, said that though Kretschmer’s father, a member of the local gun club, could face legal action if it became clear that he had illegally stored his guns, it was unlikely.

“They also lost someone they loved,” Mr Mahler said. The magazine Stern reported that Kretschmer’s parents visited the coroner’s office to say goodbye to their son yesterday. They have now been moved to a secret location with their daughter, 15, and have turned down several offers of psychological care from police The pistol, unlike the rest of Mr Kretschmer’s 15 legally held weapons, was kept in the wealthy businessman’s bedroom rather than in a locked cupboard.

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found