[farmfriend]

not to deminish the crime commited but I wondered about this statement.

12-year-old high school student

[Guillermo]

In the UK college is the US equivalent to high school and university is the US equivalent to college.

I suspect that the Japanese have a similar way of labeling levels of education.

[The Electrician]

That is simply an incorrect translation by the AP. This story has been getting a lot of "play" by the Japanese media, and even though I'm not much more that a beginner in understanding Japanese, I'm pretty sure that the NHK TV reports clearly identified the perp as a middle-school student, not a high-school student.