Teens 'plotted Columbine-style school shooting'

Five teenage boys accused of plotting a shooting rampage at their Kansas high school on the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre were arrested after a message warning of a gun attack appeared on a website.

Sheriff’s deputies in Riverton found guns, ammunition, knives and coded messages in the bedroom of one suspect, Sheriff Steve Norman said. Authorities also found documents about firearms and references to Armageddon in two suspects’ school lockers.

“What the resounding theme is: they were actually going to do this,” Norman said.

Four suspects were arrested at their homes yesterday. The fifth was taken into custody at the school. None of the names of the pupils, aged 16-18, was released.

Kansas attorney general Phill Kline, whose office took over the prosecution at the request of the county attorney, said charges were likely to be announced later today, when the suspects were expected to appear in court.

No decision had been made on whether to charge the four suspects younger than 18 as adults, he said.

Deputies’ interviews with the suspects indicated they planned to wear black trench coats and disable the school’s camera system before starting the attack between noon and 1pm yesterday, Norman said. The suspects had apparently been plotting since the beginning of the school year.

Officials at Riverton High School began investigating on Tuesday after they learned that a threatening message had been posted on the website MySpace.com, he said.

The message discussed the significance of April 20, which is Adolf Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School attack in Colorado, in which two pupils wearing trench coats killed 13 people and committed suicide, the sheriff said.

“The message - it was brief, but it stated that there was going to be a shooting at the Riverton school and that people should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets,” Norman said.

But Riverton school district superintendent David Walters said the significance of the threat did not become clear until Wednesday night, after a woman in North Carolina who had chatted with one of the suspects on Myspace.com received more specific information that there would be about a dozen potential victims, at least one of whom was a staff member. She contacted authorities in her state, who contacted the sheriff’s department.

Norman said that the potential victims were popular students and that the suspects may have been bullied.

MySpace.com – a social networking hub with more 72 million members – released a statement declining to discuss the case because of the investigation, adding that it has provided users with mechanisms to report inappropriate content.

Kline said school would resume today. About 900 pupils in all grades attend the campus.