German police question warning on Internet

As a portrait emerged of the troubled teenager who rampaged through his former school in a murderous spree this week, German police and officials on Friday distanced themselves on Friday from their initial assertion that the killer had signaled his intention on the Internet.

Tim Kretschmer, 17, took his own life after fatally shooting 15 people, 12 at his former school at Winnenden, near Stuttgart, and three more after he hijacked a car at gunpoint to flee to another town 25 miles away. Police said he had used an unsecured pistol from his family home.

Initially, the police and a state official made much in a public announcement of what they said was a Internet chat-room conversation between Kretschmer and another 17-year-old identified as Bernd only hours before the shooting. Details of the exchange were said by the authorities to have been reported by the father of the person called Bernd.

The Internet posting was said by a senior state official to have declared: "I have weapons and will go to my old school and really burn them up. I might get out alive, but you will certainly hear about me tomorrow. Remember the name Winnenden."

Reversing their initial account, the police on Friday disputed the authenticity of the reported posting, which did not identify Kretschmer by name.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported Friday that Heribert Rech, the state interior minister who first made the chat room messages public, said that the posting now appeared to be the work of "some crazy person" who "sent a false message to the world." The posting "must have been constructed after the event," he said, the paper reported. "I have always made it clear that we were talking about the preliminary stages of the investigation. It must now be clarified how the father of a 17-year-old could claim that he saw the posting before the deed."

Also on Friday, a police spokesman, Nikolaus Brenner, told the German news agency dpa that there was no indication that the alleged warning had originated on Kretschmer's personal computer. He added: "At the moment I can confirm neither that the posting was forged nor that it was genuine."

Early on Thursday, the police appeared confident of the posting's authenticity. Later, after the Web site that they named denied that there had been such a posting, the police said they were investigating that new information. The police spokesman, Brenner, said on Friday that there had maybe been a "communications error" in the initial assessment.

It was unclear whether the apparent forgery of the chat room comments would at all shift the portrait investigators have been painting of Kretschmer as a classic example of a conflicted young man who wreaked havoc in real life after savoring imaginary violence in the digital world.

"The brutality of his crimes was overwhelming.

Of the 12 people Kretschmer killed at the school, 8 were girls, 3 were female teachers and one was a male student. Several were killed with carefully placed shots to the head. After killing an employee of a clinic for the mentally ill, he sprayed at least 13 rounds to kill two people at a Volkswagen dealership before turning the gun on himself.

Prosecutors said they could file criminal charges against the shooter's parents for failing to secure the pistol that he used, as required by German law. The gun was a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol that his father kept unsecured in a bedroom; other firearms owned by his father were under lock and key, the authorities said.

Searching his bedroom, the police found violent computer games - in which players digitally clothe and arm themselves for combat - as well as brutal videos and toy weapons that fire small yellow pellets, said Siegfried Mahler of the Stuttgart prosecutors' office.

Some German officials said that some people always slipped through the system undetected.

"We need to recognize that there is no such thing as absolute security; that we cannot simply prevent everything," Volker Kauder, the leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, told German public radio. But the Winnenden shootings seem likely to renew a debate in Germany over banning violent video games.

"These games basically program the minds of young men a thousand times over," said Alina Wilms, a psychologist involved in treating people affected by the Erfurt shooting, who advocates a ban. "If ever it were going to be possible," she said, "then now."

Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.