A university student in Mallorca, Juan Manuel Morales Sierra, had decided that he wanted his own Columbine-type massacre, but better and at his own university. He had watched endlessly the footage of the massacre carried out by Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Kletbold – they were his heroes.

To carry out his planned massacre at the Mallorca university, he had obtained the materials to make 140 kilos of explosives. Fortunately for his fellow students but unfortunately for him, he had more or less told people what he was going to do, using the murkier pages of the Internet social networks, using such aliases as ‘Scary, Celtibero-Godo and Subzero91, amongst others. Probably the reason that he gloried on his plans on the Net was because he was looking for an accomplice, with his boast that he could surpass the massacre in Denver in 1994. “Please, only 13 dead; I could do it better,” was his boast. He criticised that the American duet had taken 50 minutes to kill so few and that they should have used grenades.” Yet he was desperate to emulate them, which was why in his mind the Mallorca massacre had to be carried out by two people.

The web forums where he was making these kinds of comments is one used primarily by Mexican and Velezuelan users and it was a journalist from the second county that alerted the Spanish police.

So, what the hell was going on in Juan Manuel Morales Sierra’s head to turn him into this mass murder in the making? Why would he comment on the Net concerning the Columbine Massacre, “Nobody died who didn’t deserve it; they should only feel sorry about not taking enough ammunition”?

Like the two Americans, he appears to have been a victim of bullying and this was his way of getting even. His mental deterioration was a long time coming, as around three years ago he was offering his services on Internet to be a guitarist in a group, although nobody took him up – they just made fun of the fact that he couldn’t spell the names of the groups that he admired: The Cure, Nirvana and Metallica. Even then he was boasting that he knew a sure way of becoming ‘famous.’

Editorial comment: Judging by the photographs of him in handcuffs all over the national press, he appears to be almost smiling – he’s got his 15 minutes, but at what price? In his own mind, no doubt, he is playing out imagined comments by his erstwhile tormentors and those that ignored him on the Net, saying basically “Wow, Morales, who would have guessed!”

(News: Mallorca. Balearic Islands, Spain)