A gunman who killed eight people in a school shooting in southern Finland and turned the gun on himself has died in hospital.

The gunman took several students hostage inside Jokela High School in Tuusula, some 40 miles (60 km) from the capital Helsinki.

One of the dead is the head teacher at the building, which houses both a middle school and high school.

Tuusula municipality spokeswoman Tuula Panula said: "The siege is over".

The incident occurred just hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre at the school. Police say the killer was an 18-year old high school student.

The video, set to rock music, shows a photograph which then fragments to reveal a red-tinted photo of a man pointing a gun at the camera.

It is entitled "Jokela High School Massacre - 11/7/2007" and was posted by a user called Sturmgeist89. Sturmgeist means storm spirit in German.

Kim Kiuru, a teacher at the school, said the gunman is a pupil there. He said: "It felt unreal, a pupil I have taught myself was running towards me, screaming, a pistol in his hand.

"He (the gunman) was moving systematically through the school hallways, knocking on the doors and shooting through the doors," Mr Kiuru said, adding he helped his pupils escape the building through the classroom windows.

Despite having the third-largest per capita ratio of handgun ownership in the world, violent incidents are rare at Finnish schools.

According to Finnish media, there have been four stabbings at schools since 1999, but none of these caused fatalities.

The last major attack in the country came in 2002 when a young man killed himself and six others in a bomb blast at a shopping mall in Helsinki.

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