Tas: School bullying led to Port Arthur massacre expert

AAP General News (Australia)
04-08-2000
Tas: School bullying led to Port Arthur massacre expert

SYDNEY, April 8 AAP - Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant relived school bullying incidents
which became an underlying cause of the 1996 massacre in which 35 people were murdered,
it has been reported.

A confidential psychiatric report prepared six months after the April 28, 1996 killings
in Tasmania said Bryant had been bullied at school from the age of seven, The Sunday Telegraph
reports in tomorrow's edition.

"No-one wanted to be my friend. All I wanted was for people to like me," Bryant is
reported as saying.

He was often terrified of schools because of the bullying but was also an angry and
violent child who tormented weaker children and animals.

The report, by the head of Monash University's psychiatry department Professor Paul
Mullen, said that Bryant heard voices he thought were ghosts and drank heavily in the
lead-up to the killings.

The report concluded that Bryant was not insane, a finding based on medical and psychiatric
records dating back to childhood and police material.

AAP rds/it

KEYWORD: BRYANT

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