US: A milk delivery man shot dead three girls before taking his own life at a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in America's third deadly school shooting in less than a week.
Police said Charles Carl Roberts (32), separated boys from girls and released the boys with their teacher before barricading the doors and binding the girls' feet.
He shot 10 girls, leaving three dead and seven injured with gunshot wounds to the head. "He split them up, males and females. He bound them up by the blackboard and then shot them execution style," said Col Jeffrey Miller of the Pennsylvania State Police.
Col Miller said Roberts' motive was still being determined, but "apparently he did make a statement to his wife that he was acting out of revenge . . . for something that occurred 20 years ago. It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims."
The school, which had just 27 pupils, was run by the Amish community, who live simply, dress in traditional clothes, avoid technology and use horses and traps rather than motorised vehicles. The area is usually so peaceful that there are no police for many miles around.
Roberts lived nearby with his wife and two children but he was not a member of the Amish community. Police said the killer went to work as usual on the night before the shootings and left his children to school yesterday morning.
He left a suicide note for his wife and called her during the siege, apparently identifying the 20-year-old incident which had made his life intolerable and for which he was apparently seeking revenge from the schoolgirls.
"It appears that when he began shooting these victims, the victims were shot execution style in the head," Col Miller said.
Last Friday a 15-year-old boy shot and fatally wounded his school's principal in western Wisconsin. Two days earlier, a man in Colorado took six female high school students hostage, sexually assaulted them and then shot one girl dead and killed himself as police closed in. Authorities are concerned that the similarity between yesterday's shootings and the incident in Colorado may suggest it was a copycat attack.
Since the Columbine school massacre in 1999 left 15 people dead, US school boards and teachers have tried to improve school safety. There were 24 fatal school shootings in the US in the 2004-2005 academic year and 17 non-fatal shootings since August 1st this year.