CNN) -- At least nine people were killed Tuesday when a man opened fire at a college in southwestern Finland, the town's mayor told CNN.
Police vehicles attend the scene of the shooting at a school in Kauhajoki, Finland.
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The shooter then tried to kill himself but was not successful, local fire official, Olle Peauttonen, said.
Several other people were wounded in the attack, Jarkko Sipila of MTV 3 told CNN.
Earlier reports from the state media had said the man, a student at the school, committed suicide after the shooting.
But Mikka Pettersson of the Finnish News Agency (STT) said the shooter had a gunshot wound to the head but survived.
The shots were reported at a college for home- and institutional-economics in the municipality of Kauhajoki, according to YLE, a Finnish national broadcaster.
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Three hours after the shooting, firefighters were trying to bring a blaze at the school building under control, Peauttonen said.
Police held a news conference but did not say exactly how many people died in the attack.
The shooter was a 22-year-old student at the school, YLE said. He was spotted moving about the school shortly before the shooting started at 11 a.m., the broadcaster reported, according the Finnish News Agency (STT).
Smoke was billowing from the school Tuesday afternoon, the news agency said.
Jukka Forsberg, a maintenance worker at the school, told YLE that several people were injured. The worker said a man with a ski mask went into the building with a large bag. Soon after, the worker heard shots fired.
Don't Miss The school taught late teens and young adults, Sipila said. "It's more or less like an agricultural or professional school where people teach how to make food or how to cook in big kitchen, in industrial kitchens," he said.
Meanwhile, speculation surrounded a video on Web site YouTube, which appeared to show a man from the town of Kauhajoki firing a pistol at a shooting range. It was eventually withdrawn from the site.
Kauhajoki, with a population of about 15,000, is about 290km (180 miles) from the capital, Helsinki.
The incident comes almost a year after another school shooting left nine people, including the gunman, dead in the
Finnish town of Tuusala.
Before that shooting, the gunman, 18-year-old student Pekka-Eric Auvinen, posted a video on YouTube titled "Jokela High School Massacre 11/7/2007" -- identifying the date and location of the attack.
"All these memories are being brought back and people are asking the question, 'Why again'?" Sipila said.
Finland enjoys a strong tradition of hunting and has a high proportion of gun ownership, with 2 million firearms owned in a nation of 5 million people.
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