BRAZIL'S SCHOOL TRAGEDY

TWO former students opened fire at a Brazilian school on Wednesday and killed at least five teenagers as well as two school officials before committing suicide in an attack that police said was inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in the United States.

Before entering the Raul Brasil school in Suzano near Sao Paulo, the former pupils aged 17 and 25  shot and killed the younger assailant's uncle, who owned a car rental agency where they stole a vehicle.

Ten people, including the two attackers, were killed in total, Sao Paulo police said. The students who died were mostly 15 and 16 years old.

Police identified the assailants as Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17, and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25. The 17 year-old was the leader and the main-planner, an investigator said.

Another 10 people, mostly school children, were shot and injured, with several in serious condition, said police.

An amateur video aired by Globo TV showed children screaming, running and begging for their lives as loud shots were heard.

Children climbed and jumped over a wall that surrounds the school building, then sprinted down streets, screaming for help, security camera footage from homes nearby showed.

The two assailants spent more than a year planning their attack, which they ''hoped would draw more attention than the Columbine massacre,'' an investigator said on condition of anonymity.

In the 1999 attack on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colarado, two students killed 13 people.

A motive was not yet clear. The school is in a  middle-class neighborhood and has abut 1,000 students aged 11 to 16.

One teacher told the police that the younger attacker had been bullied while he was student there.

School shootings are rare in Brazil, although the country is one of the world's most violent and with more annual homicides than any other.

The last major school shooting was in 2011, when 12 children were shot dead by a former pupil in Rio de Janeiro. [Agencies]