Stuttgart - An unemployed man was given a five-month suspended prison sentence on Wednesday for a massacre hoax on the same day a teenage gunman killed
15 in a shooting spree in Germany.

A court in Stuttgart found the 24-year-old guilty of disturbing public order by threatening to commit a crime.

The man wrote a fake news text about someone running amok at a vocational college in the south-west town of Waiblingen and posted it on an internet website.

Waiblingen is not far from Winnenden, where Tim Kretschmer, 17, gunned down 12 people at a secondary school before fleeing and killing three others until police caught him and he shot himself.

The defendant told the court he had been watching television coverage of the shootings all day and was drunk and under the influence of drugs when he wrote his message on the internet.

There have been more than 50 hoax threats against schools in the south-west state of Baden-Wuerrtemberg since the March 11 massacre.

The state, where Winnenden is located, held a minute's silence on Wednesday for the victims, three more of whom were buried during the course of the day.

A memorial service is to be held in the town on Saturday after which German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Horst Koehler plan to met with families of the victims.

Investigations showed Kretschmer carried out the shootings with a Beretta pistol he stole from the bedroom of his father, a hobby marksman who kept 15 guns at his home.

Police have launched a criminal investigation into the father on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter.

The Winnenden shooting was Germany's worst school bloodbath since April 2002, when a 19-year-old high school student went on a rampage in Erfurt, killing 16 people before taking his own life. (dpa)