‘It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims’

A TRUCK driver walked into an Amish school yesterday and sent the boys outside before holding the girls hostage and shooting them.

Three children were found dead at the scene and seven others were taken to hospitals.

The gunman, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, then turned the gun on himself, state police commissioner Jeffrey Miller said.

Roberts walked into the one-room West Nickel Mines Amish School, in Pennsylvania, with a shotgun and an automatic handgun and barricaded himself inside after releasing about 15 boys, a pregnant woman and three women with infants.

The girls were lined up along a blackboard and their feet were bound, Mr Miller said.

A teacher called the police and reported that a gunman was holding students hostage.

Roberts apparently called his wife from a mobile phone about half an hour later, saying he was “acting out in revenge for something that happened 20 years ago”.

Mr Miller said: “It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims.”

Moments later, Roberts told police he would open fire on the children if officers at the scene did not back away from the building.

Within seconds, troopers heard gunfire in the building.

The school had about 25 to 30 students, aged six to 13 years.

The school is set in farmland just outside Nickel Mines, a village about 55 miles west of Philadelphia.

Three girls, ages 6-12, were admitted to Lancaster General Hospital in critical condition with gunshot wounds, spokesman John Lines said. Officials at the Milton S Hershey Medical Centre confirmed that victims also were being admitted there.

Mr Miller said: “Officers had to break windows to get into the school — by then, three young girls and the gunman were dead.”

The Amish number about 180,000 in 25 states, with 70% of the population in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana.

They practice a form of Christianity that emphasises piety, modesty and community derived from a literal reading of the Bible.

Members tend to dress in simple, mostly dark clothes, speak in a German dialect, and often shun technological innovation, including electricity, television, cars, telephones and tractors.

The Amish run their own schools, but most communities educate their children only up to the eighth grade, which American students reach at about 13 years old.

US courts have exempted the Amish and other groups from further education on the grounds of religious freedom.

Police had surrounded the one-room schoolhouse, a tiny building surrounded by a white fence and farm fields in southeastern Lancaster County. The Lancaster County 911 website reported that dozens of emergency units were dispatched to a “medical emergency” at 10.45am local time (3.45pm Irish time).

Hours after the attack, about three dozen people in traditional Amish clothing, broad-brimmed hats and bonnets stood nearby speaking to one another and authorities. Others gathered with a group of children at a nearby farm while investigators stretched out in a line across a field searching for evidence.

It was the third deadly school shooting in the US in less than a week.

On Friday, a school principal was gunned down in Cazenovia, Wisconsin. A 15-year-old student, described as upset over a reprimand, was charged with murder in the killing.

Just two days earlier, an adult gunman held six girls hostage in a school at Bailey, Colorado, before killing a 16-year-old girl and then himself.

The 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, remains the deadliest school shooting, claiming the lives of 15 people, including the two teenage gunmen.

Last year, a 16-year-old shot seven people to death at a school on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, then killed himself.