Petri Gerdt's name was circulating on the Net well before police released it to the media

By Kari A. Hintikka and Ossi Leander The after-shocks of the bombing at a Vantaa shopping mall on Friday 11th October have rocked the Internet, with calls for closer surveillance of message boards and counter- claims that the Net itself is not to blame, and in any event it is largely unpoliceable.

Less has been written about the way in which Internet-users carried out their own detective work in the hours and minutes following the fatal explosion. Message board members and chatroom users on IRC (Internet Relay Chat - see attached article for an explanation), operating under online aliases, put together crumbs of information and arrived at the name of the culprit well before either the police or the media was in a position to go public. This is the story of how it happened.