Students return to Brazil school where gunman shot 12

Students read a special edition of a paper on their return to school
Continue reading the main story
Related Stories

Brazil to call for gun law vote
Brazil mourns murdered Rio pupils
Twelve die in Rio school shooting
Students have returned to the school in Brazil where a gunman killed 12 children on 7 April.

Those killed were between 10 and 13 years old, and all but two were girls.

The gunman, a former pupil at the school in Rio de Janeiro killed himself after being wounded by police.

The director of the school said the first days would be taken up by individual counselling sessions with the students and therapeutic activities such as painting.

A group of parents from the Tasso da Silveira school in the west of Rio met with local officials on Monday to ask for a permanent medical and psychological unit to be created at the school.

Local Education Secretary Claudia Costin said the classrooms where the shootings happened had been repainted to erase traces of bullet holes and blood.

She said the two rooms where the greatest number of pupils had been killed had been turned into a library and an IT room.

Revenge for bullying

On the weekend, officials released new videos recorded by the gunman, 23-year-old Wellington Menezes de Oliveira.


The gunman said he had been bullied at school
In one of them, he reads out the suicide note which was found on him after the shootings.

In the other one, he tells of the humiliations he says he suffered at school. In it, he says he hopes what happened "would serve as a lesson".

Police say he went into a classroom with two revolvers and lined people up before shooting them in the head at close range.

Security video footage shows children running down hallways to escape as he reloaded his guns. He shot himself in the head after being shot in the leg by a policeman.

Four of the 12 pupils who were injured in the attack remain in hospital.