Blood and hell in Argentine high school

A 15 year-old boy broke into a school and shot his schoolmates. Three are reported dead and six injured.

Carmen de Patagones is a small quite town in the South of the Buenos Aires province, some 1.000 kilometres from Argentine's capital. Nothing usually happens there, mainly since a project to bring country's administrative district there was aborted in the eighties due to lack of resources.

However, the cold and windy town in the Atlantic was shocked on Tuesday as calls to the local and national radio began reporting that a 15 year-old boy broke into the public schools killing, in a bloody shootout, three of his schoolmates and seriously wounding other six, according to preliminary official reports.

After the bloodshed, the boy was arrested at the gates of the Islas Malvinas School, named after the notorious archipelago that once belonged to Argentina but the United Kingdom administers since the 1830's. According the police, the kid shot everybody with a gun that belonged to his father, a police officer.

Witnesses say that the massacre took place at the beginning of the school day, very early in the morning, when all the students gather in the playground to pay tribute to the national flag. The police said, according to newspaper Clarin, that the murderer was completed shocked and did not say anything while shooting.

He shot until he run out of bullets. Everybody in the school was running scared until the police came and arrested him. In declarations to a local news agency, Buenos Aires’ Education minister, Mario Oporto, said that the case surpassed all the limits of violence. Mr. Oporto flew to Carmen de Patagones to get the details of the tragedy and visit the six hospitalized.

Photo: The town of Carmen de Patagones, a small village in the South of the Buenos Aires' Province, Argentina.