A medical student who shot dead two of his next-door neighbours and a lecturer has told a court he had originally planned to kill several students at the same time.

Faroud L. said he had reasoned with himself to keep casualties to a minimum when he took a loaded gun into Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Centre on September 28, 2023.

L. shot dead 43-year-old Jurgen Damen as he was giving a lecture and set fire to the classroom, but refrained from firing the gun at his fellow students.

Shortly beforehand he had killed his neighbour, a 39-year-old woman, and her 14-year-old daughter in their home before setting his own flat ablaze.

L. said he was filled with an “uncontrollable rage” after the university prevented him sitting his medical exams because he refused undergo a psychological assessment.

Following a script

The court heard he prepared the shootings meticulously. “It was like following a recipe,” he said. “There was a script that had to be played out: it was that simple.”

But after acquiring the guns through a contact he made while serving a community service order for mistreating his pet rabbit, L. became locked in an “internal conflict” about the scale of the attack.

“During those negotiations the plan was minimalised, and that was the final plan,” he said. “That is what was left over.”

Researchers at the Pieter Baan Centrum, where criminal suspects undergo psychiatric assessment, concluded that L. has a form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s syndrome, which gives him “great difficulty recognising and processing emotions”.

They said he had diminshed responsibility and advised the court to impose a compulsory psychiatric treatment order alongside his sentence. The prosecution is expected to submit its sentencing demand at the end of the week.

Hippocratic oath

L. told the court he had dreamed since the age of five of becoming a doctor, adding: “I’m convinced I could have been a great doctor, but it all went wrong.”

The judge asked him during Monday’s hearing how his treatment of his neighbour and her daughter, who bled to death as he sped away on his motorcycle, could be reconciled with the Hippocratic oath.

“It doesn’t,” L. replied. “That’s what I find so sad. That I did the opposite of what I always wanted to do.”