March 11 (Bloomberg) -- A teenager dressed in camouflage killed at least 15 people, including nine children and three teachers, when he opened fire at a school before going on a shooting spree near Stuttgart in southwest Germany.

The 17-year-old gunman probably turned his gun on himself following a shootout with authorities about 3 hours after fleeing the Albertville Realschule in the town of Winnenden, 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Stuttgart, police said. He killed one person while fleeing the school and two people at a car dealership. Two police officers were badly injured.

“Rescue teams faced a horrible scene when they entered the classrooms,” said Heribert Rech, interior minister for the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The gunman entered the school building armed with a handgun -- a 9mm Beretta -- and hundreds of rounds of ammunition from his father’s collection of 15 weapons, Rech said. He went into four different rooms, three classrooms and a chemistry laboratory, picking out female victims: Of the nine pupils killed, eight were girls. All three teachers were women. All the shots were to the head. Another seven schoolgirls were injured.

When the first police officers arrived at the school minutes after an initial emergency call was received at 9:33 a.m., the gunman fired at them and then fled. He left more than a hundred rounds of ammunition behind and later hijacked a car in Winnenden and headed to Wendlingen, a town about 25 kilometers to the south. He killed a salesman and a client at the car dealership before he died.

Gun Club

Police declined to give his name, saying only that he was an otherwise unremarkable local boy who graduated from the school last year and had started an apprenticeship. Both he and his father were members of a gun club.