Police: New school attack thwarted

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- Police say they have shut down a high school in northern Germany after receiving a tip that a gunman planned a rampage there.

A local police spokesman said Tuesday the tip came from Finnish police who were investigating a fatal school shooting near Helsinki this month. It also comes days after police said they thwarted another plot in Cologne.

The Finnish police were monitoring an Internet chatroom when two people in the chatroom said they overheard that a gunman planned a rampage at a school in the German town of Kaarst, near Duesseldorf, Kaarst police spokesman Ralf Kamphausen said.

The threat was not concrete but police closed the school as a precaution, he said.

Tuesday was the one-year anniversary of a school shooting in Emsdetten, near Muenster in western Germany. In that attack, an 18-year-old former student shot and wounded six people before killing himself.

Kamphausen said there was no evidence that the shooting in Kaarst was planned to coincide with the anniversary.

Over the weekend, German police announced they thwarted another shooting plot at a Cologne high school that may have been intended to coincide with the date.

Police said they confiscated two crossbows, two air guns, a list of intended victims and instructions on how to build a pipe bomb.

One 18-year-old suspect was in custody in the Cologne case and the other, a 17-year-old, committed suicide after police questioned him about the alleged plot.

The prosecutor in Cologne announced Monday that police released the 18-year-old after determining he did not intend to carry out the planned attack. The prosecutor said police had evidence from an Internet chatroom backing up the suspect's claim that he had changed his mind about the shooting.

The 18-year-old was released into psychiatric care, the prosecutor said.

Earlier this month, a student in Finland killed eight people in a high school before fatally turning the gun on himself. E-mail to a friend

CNN's Diana Magnay contributed to this report.

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