The 12-year-old boy suspected of shooting and killing a fellow student and wounding two others had been the victim of bullying, Finnish police said Wednesday. “The motive for the act has been identified as bullying. The suspect has told the police during interrogations that he has been the victim of bullying and this information has also been confirmed in the police’s preliminary investigation,” police said in a statement, adding that the suspect had been transferred to the school at the beginning of the year. Police were alerted to the incident in Vantaa, northeast of the capital, Helsinki, shortly after 9 a.m. local time Tuesday. Images from the scene showed a large police presence at the school, which has around 800 students and 90 employees and is attended by children ages 7 to 15. According to authorities, the suspect was in custody by 10 a.m. and had a handgun in his possession. The weapon is licensed and belongs to a close relative, police said. Police said the crimes are murder and attempted murder “due to some degree of planning,” but because the suspect is 12 years old, he is not criminally responsible.

School shootings are unusual in Finland, with four previous incidents in the past 35 years. “We thought that as a society, we would have learned from previous school shootings,” National Police Commissioner Seppo Kolehmainen said at the news conference Tuesday. “Such a day should not have happened.”

The 2008 incident prompted a tightening of gun laws. There are 430,000 licensed gun owners in a population of 5.5 million (7.8%), in a country where hunting is popular. A Secret Service study of 41 U.S. school shootings found that “most of the attackers were bullied by their classmates, and for over half of the attackers the bullying appeared to be of a persistent pattern which lasted for weeks, months, or years.” As of March 6, there have been at least 16 school shootings in the U.S. this year.

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