The Wall Street Journal reported about the shooting at a Rio de Janeiro school,
Rio School Shooting Shocks City
A heavily armed former student went on a shooting rampage at an elementary school in this beach front city, killing 11 students and wounding 17 before turning the gun on himself, an unprecedented incident that left the country in shock.
The violence claimed the lives of 10 girls and one boy at the Tasso da Silveira public school in the Realengo neighborhood on the city’s west side. The wounded were ferried to local hospitals via helicopter from a makeshift airfield erected at a nearby soccer field. Officials said that, given the gravity of some of the injuries, the death toll could climb.
The Reuters video above rules out gang violence, however, at Monsters and Critics (via Gates of Vienna
Police Colonel Djalma Beltrami said the killer used two handguns and a lot of ammunition. The suspect left behind a letter, in which he anticipated committing suicide after the attack. Beltrami, however, gave no details of any possible motive.
Beltrami described the letter as ‘the words of a person who no longer believes in anything, full of sentences that made no sense and references to Islamic fundamentalism.’
Atlas Shrugs links to local media reports that show that the killer’s suicide note had “Islamist fundamentalism” wording and that he was linked to Islamism.
O Globo’s psychiatric profile mentions that “individuals with fragile personalities can be seduced by ideologies and cults, as appears to have been the case.”
However, upon reading the portion of the text of the suicide note published by O Globo (in Portuguese), Wellington Menezes de Oliveira refers to how he wants his body prepared after his death “not touched by the unclean”, but does not directly refer to Islam. He did mention Jesus.
UPDATE, 4:45PM:
I was reading Ace’s post where he refers to Menezes de Oliveira as a likely jihadist. Ace makes a good point, considering that the killer had expressed interest in Islam, but the fact remains that the suicide note itself asks for God’s forgiveness (not Allah’s), and prays that Jesus “wakes me up from the sleep of death into life”.
This was an act of a homicidal lunatic, but not an Islamist.
Post re-edited to include omitted sentence.
