A student killed eight people in a shooting on Monday at Perm University, a city in the Urals in eastern Russia, before being injured and arrested, the country’s Investigation Committee said.
Armed incidents of this type have increased in Russia in recent years, leading to tougher laws on carrying weapons.
“On September 20, a student in one of the university buildings … opened fire on people around. As a result, eight people died and several were injured“, said in a statement this body responsible for the most important investigations of the country.
He added that the record “was being clarified“.
The author who claimed responsibility for the attack on social media has “was injured during his arrest as he was resisting“, added the Investigation Committee.
According to information provided by journalist Andrei Vaitovich, the 18-year-old shooter claims to be “apolitical”, and claims not to belong to a terrorist or religious organization.
“This is not a terrorist act […] It is a personal act “he would have claimed.
Fleeing the shooting, students jumped from the windows of the first floor of a university building, according to videos posted on social media.
Another video, shot from a window, showed an individual dressed entirely in black opening fire and walking towards the entrance of a building.
The assailant, whose identity has been established but not disclosed, entered the campus at eleven a.m. local time (0600 GMT), according to the university press service.
Shootings in schools or universities were rare in Russia, where gun control is strict, but they have tended to become more numerous in recent years, with President Vladimir Putin even denouncing a phenomenon imported from the United States, a perverse effect. of globalization.
Last such deadly event, on May 11, 2021, a 19-year-old young man opened fire at his old school in Kazan, in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, killing nine people.
The same day, the Russian president ordered a review of the rules concerning the carrying of weapons. The perpetrator of the attack in Kazan, who had been arrested, carried a permit for a semi-automatic weapon.
The most serious recent drama dates back to October 2018, when a high school student killed 19 people before killing himself at a high school in Kerch, a town on the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.
The authorities also claimed to have foiled in recent years dozens of plans to attack schools, cases often involving teenagers.
In February 2020, the security services (FSB) arrested two young people, born in 2005 and of Russian nationality, who were active on various websites where they defended murders and suicide. According to investigators, they planned to attack a school in Saratov, on the Volga.
Reference-feedproxy.google.com