Staff meet at Canada college after gunman rampage

MONTREAL, Sep 15: Faculty and support staff were set to return to Montreal's Dawson College today, two days after a female student was killed and 19 others injured in a gunman's shooting spree.

Officials at the junior college near downtown Montreal said teachers and support staff were scheduled to meet today afternoon to prepare the school for the resumption of classes on Tuesday.

The college, which has about 10,000 full and part-time students, will re-open on Monday so that employees and students can retrieve belongings left behind in their panic-stricken rush from the building on Wednesday afternoon when the gunman went on a rampage at the college.

Kimveer Gill, a 25-year-old man from a Montreal suburb, died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head after a shootout with police.

Armed with three firearms, Gill fatally shot an 18-year-old female student, Anastasia DeSousa, and wounded some 11 others during his rampage. Others were hurt as they tried to escape the shooting.

Four victims remained in critical condition on Friday at Montreal General Hospital, including one who was in a deep coma, public health officials said. Victims' wounds included gunshots to the head, abdomen, chest and limbs.

Makeshift memorials to the victims appeared around perimeter of the Dawson College campus on Friday as people left flowers, cards and candles along its fences.

In his online journal, Gill professed his love of guns and hatred for people and society.

''His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death,'' Gill wrote in his profile on the Goth culture Web site www.vampirefreaks.com.

He wrote of his love of heavy metal music and violent computers games, including the controversial ''Super Columbine Massacre RPG,'' which he listed among his favorites.

The game is based on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two student gunmen killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives.

OUTRAGE OVER MONTREAL SHOOTING

Dismay and outrage swirled across the province of Quebec today over reports from police that the three firearms Gill used in the attack were legally registered.

One of the weapons was a 9-mm semi-automatic carbine.

''We need to concentrate on what can be done to make sure semi-automatic, as well as automatic, guns are not accessible to anyone, ever again,'' wrote Janet Bagnall, a columnist for the Montreal's Gazette newspaper.

Quebec has been a staunch supporter of Ottawa's long-gun registry, which ran into controversy over its massively inflated budget. The current Conservative government wants to scrap the registry, which was brought in by a previous Liberal government to clamp down on gun crime.

Foreign Minister Peter MacKay, a former prosecutor, told reporters he thought the government would discuss possibly tightening restrictions on automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

''If there are certain types of weapons -- and I would suggest automatic weapons in particular that can be fired in rapid succession -- then we have to really question whether that type of weaponry is necessarily available to the public, and limit perhaps its use other than on firing ranges,'' MacKay said in Ottawa.

Wednesday's shooting was the third in 16 years at an educational institution in Quebec.

In August 1992, a mechanical engineering professor at Concordia University in Montreal shot four professors and a secretary. Three professors died at the scene and the fourth perished days later in hospital.

In December 1989, a gunman killed 14 women at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique before killing himself.

It was after this mass murder that Ottawa tightened laws that already restricted handguns and semi-automatic weapons and introduced the registry for rifles and shotguns.

Reuters