Argentine police and FBI thwart plans for two school shootings

Argentinas Federal Police stopped two school shootings after receiving an alert from the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) about the possibility of the attacks. The accused, two teenagers aged 15 and 16, had been making posts with hate messages and racial supremacy. In the messages, they also expressed their intention of carrying out a school massacre, said a statement by the Federal Police. The antiterrorist investigations unit of the Argentine Federal Police was alerted by the FBI about the posts, and began looking into them. According to the investigation, the teens were planning to carry out shootings at their schools one of them in La Quiaca, the northernmost city in Argentina, and the other in Miramar, a small coastal town in Buenos Aires province.  The two dont know each other in person, and only spoke online. The judiciary ordered the homes of the teens to be searched. Police seized objects with Nazi symbols hunting knives, firearm ammunition, three laptops, a tablet, and seven cellphones. The case was labeled as public intimidation. The teens, however, were not arrested. According to Argentine law, only minors 16 and above have criminal responsibility over their actions. This means that only the oldest of the two teenagers could be prosecuted. The government is pushing for the approval of a bill to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 14, which was met with rejection by several sectors from the opposition. Although school shootings are very rare in Argentina, a slew of recent reports indicate that the problem might be on the rise.  In November, a 16-year-old was arrested in Buenos Aires city, accused of planning a school shooting. Police had also been alerted by an FBI report at the time, stating the teen had been making threatening posts on X. In September, a 14-year-old girl entered a school in the town of La Paz, Mendoza, with a firearm and fired three times, although no one was hurt. After several hours refusing to cooperate, she handed the pistol over to the local police, and was transferred to a hospital. In April, a group of students from Ingeniero Maschwitz Buenos Aires province, created a WhatsApp group called School shooting in which they spoke about how to carry out the attack.  I am a fan of school shootings, one of them said. The first school shooting reported in Latin America took place in Argentina in 1997 in the Greater Buenos Aires area, in which a boy killed one classmate. A similar thing happened three years later in the same metropolitan area. The most renowned and deadly case was in 2004 in Carmen de Patagones, when a student named Rafael Solich shot eight of his classmates, killing three of them.