November 10, 2007 (LPAC) – Under the headline, "The Cyber School for Killers," today's London Times reports the following: "A group of young people who idolized the Columbine High School killers may have shared information on the internet… The YouTube killer who shot dead eight members of his school in Finland before turning his gun on himself had Internet contacts with an American teenager who was planning a shooting spree in a high school in Philadelphia, it was claimed yesterday."

The disclosure could turn upside down previous assumptions about the dynamics of school massacres. Until now, teenage killers were regarded as depressed loners whose imagination had been stoked by aggressive computer games. Now it seems that information may have been shared by potential killers over the Internet: a virtual community of young people who idolise the 1999 Columbine High School murders.

"It's highly probable that there was some form of contact between Pekka-Eric Auvinen and Dillon Cossey," a spokesman for the cyber crime department of Helsinki police said. Dillon Cossey, 14, was arrested last month on suspicion of planning to storm his old school in Plymouth Meeting, Pa. Police acting on a tip off found a 9mm semi-automatic rifle, handmade grenades, a .22 pistol and a .22 single-shot rifle at his home. Less than two weeks later Auvinen, already a member of a shooting club, was buying his first gun — a .22 pistol — and expressing interest in a 9mm semi-automatic. Police do not believe this to have been a coincidence. The two youths are thought to have made contact over two MySpace groups, "RIP Eric and Dylan" — a reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 12 schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine- —and "Natural Selection".

The exposure of this Internet "community" of Columbine fanatics should also cause a deeper look at Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech student who killed 32 classmates and himself on April 16, 2007, and wounded dozens of others. Cho had been fascinated with the 1999 Columbine massacre since he was in 8th grade, reported an official report commissioned by the Virginia governor. The hard drive on Cho's computer was never found after the massacre, and therefore the full extent of his involvement in Internet and video game violence has not been determined.