One dead, five wounded in Iowa school shooting

An eleven-year-old student has died and five other people have been injured in the shooting perpetrated on Thursday at a high school in the town of Perry, Iowa (USA), police have confirmed. The shooter was a 17-year-old student at the school, who died by his own hand, said Mitch Mortvedt of the Iowa Police Department's Criminal Investigation division.

The injured are four students and an administrator of the center, who were taken to the hospital. One of them is in serious condition, although there are no fears for his life. The condition of the rest is stable.

The incident in this town of 8,000 residents, about 70 miles from Des Moines, the state capital, began early in the morning, when students were beginning to arrive at the high school for the first day of school after the Nacidad vacation. The first call to the emergency services was recorded at 7:37 a.m. local time (14:37 p.m. Spanish time), about twenty minutes before the start of the school day, and the first officers arrived at the school seven minutes later.

There, according to Mortvedt, they found children running around trying to escape; others had locked themselves in their classrooms. Almost immediately they found the shooter's body, with a wound that appeared to be self-inflicted. During the search of the school, the agents also found a homemade improvised bomb that they proceeded to detonate.

So far, it has not been specified what was the motive that led the student to attack the center with a pistol and a rifle. The young man acted alone, according to the police.

Images broadcast by television networks in the hours immediately after the shooting showed a huge deployment of police and fire brigade vehicles around the school, part of a school pyramid that has 1,785 students enrolled. The school district has canceled classes Thursday

The event took place a few days before the Republican caucuses to designate a candidate in the November presidential elections were held in the state. One of the hopefuls, Vivek Ramaswamy, had planned to hold a rally in Perry, but after the incident he changed his program to an act of prayer.

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