Two Australian teenagers who reportedly planned a US-style school massacre were in psychiatric care Wednesday after police swooped when their concerned headmaster alerted authorities, officials said.
The 16-year-olds planned a Columbine-style massacre, drawing up a hit-list of students and staff they planned to target and discussing their plans on an Internet chat site, Sydney's Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.
The paper said a fellow student at Crookwell High School in Goulburn, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) south-west of Sydney, raised concerns with the principal, who passed on the information to police. "Both boys are now in psychiatric care," a police spokesman told AFP. Deputy police commissioner Andrew Scipione, who did not provide details of the alleged plot, said authorities had to take threats seriously, particularly after school shootings in the United States.
Gunman Cho Seung-Hui killed 33 people, including himself, in last month's Virginia Tech massacre, while students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot dead 13 then turned their guns on themselves in the 1999 Columbine school killings. Australia had one of the world's worst massacres by a lone gunman in 1996, when Martin Bryant killed 35 people in a rampage through Port Arthur in Tasmania, prompting the introduction of strict gun control laws here.