Was Belgian Killer Emulating GTA ?
An unprovoked shooting, a European nation rife with ethnic tensions, and an apparently racist and mentally unstable killer.
Under those conditions does it come as any surprise that investigators are considering whether the murderous rampage of 18-year-old Hans Van Themsche was inspired by a video game, Grand Theft Auto?
As reported in today's Seattle Times:
"When... Van Themsche was expelled from his boarding-school dormitory for smoking... it pushed him over some existential edge. He shaved his head, bought a Winchester hunting rifle, put on a black leather trench coat and wrote a note saying he was going to kill foreigners."
And kill foreigners he did, critically wounding a Turkish woman and killing a 24-year-old nanny from Mali and the white toddler in her care before a brave police officer shot and wounded Van Themshce, thus putting an end to his rampage.
While much of the backlash to the shooting spree has focused on Van Themsche's family ties to the separatist party Vlaams Belang ("Flemish Interest"), a party official sought to shift blame elsewhere.
"He apparently wanted to commit suicide," said Vlaams Belang spokesman Phillipe Van Der Sande. "He played a lot with violent computer games, and he went to a shop and bought a gun and started shooting around with it. Such a murder has no racist motives. He was probably mentally disturbed."
According to prosecution spokeswoman Dominique Reyniers, Van Themsche "confirmed that he sympathized with the extreme right side of our political landscape" and also "declared himself to be a skinhead"
Reyniers also said investigators were looking into whether Van Themsche was recreating a scene from GTA.
GP: There are some inescapable similarities here to the January rampage in a Moscow synagogue. With Russian society rife with both violent crime and ethnic tension, a major Soviet newspaper was quick to blame the synagogue attack on the Postal series of PC games.
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