(Moscow) At least 13 people were killed, including seven children, in a shooting at a school in Izhevsk, central Russia, an “inhumane terrorist attack” according to President Vladimir Putin.
Posted at 6:20 a.m.
Updated at 7:45 a.m.
“The president deeply regrets the death of people and children in this school where a terrorist attack was perpetrated,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“According to preliminary data, 13 people, including six adults and seven minors, were victims of the crime, 14 children and 7 adults were injured,” the Investigative Committee of Russia had indicated earlier, specifying that the assailant committed suicide.
“The president wishes the wounded from this inhuman attack to be healed,” added the Kremlin.
The suspect was wearing a “black Nazi symbolism sweater and a balaclava”, according to investigators. It is a former student of this school, Artyom Kazantsev, born in 1988, they said in a separate statement. “We are checking whether he was a follower of neo-fascist positions and Nazi ideology”, according to the same source.
A previous report by the Russian Investigation Committee reported nine victims, including five children.
Investigators also released a video showing the body of an individual lying on the ground, blood around the skull and wearing a black sweater with a red swastika on it.
Earlier, the Russian Interior Ministry had mentioned six victims and 20 injured.
“The police have found the body of the man who opened fire. According to our information, he committed suicide,” he added.
The facts took place in the morning in school n°88 of this city located just west of the Ural massif, a mountain range which separates European and Asian Russia. This city still houses the factories manufacturing Kalashnikov assault rifles.
According to the governor of the region, Alexander Brechalov, the assailant killed the guard before opening fire inside the school.
The school’s website indicates that it has nearly a thousand students and 80 teachers.
The governor spoke, visibly moved, in a video made in front of the school. Behind him, medical personnel could be seen running into the building, some carrying a stretcher.
“The evacuation is complete” and “the entire perimeter is cordoned off”, he assured in his video, specifying that the Russian National Guard, the Russian security services (FSB) and “the authorities responsible for the investigation were already there.
According to the Ministry of Health, “14 ambulance teams” are also on the site and “a group of doctors” is due to go to Izhevsk soon “to help the victims”.
An investigation for “murder” and “illegal carrying of weapons” was quickly opened and transferred to the Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s main investigative body.
Tense climate
Monday’s shooting comes in a tense climate in many regions of Russia, against a backdrop of military mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists for the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Also on Monday, a man opened fire at a Russian army recruitment center in Siberia, seriously injuring a soldier working there.
Once extremely rare, fatal shootings, especially in schools, have tended to become more numerous in Russia in recent years, to the point that President Vladimir Putin has become alarmed, seeing it as a phenomenon imported from the United States and a perverse effect. of globalization, which led him to toughen the legislation on the carrying of arms.
In April, a man opened fire in a kindergarten and killed two children and a teacher, before committing suicide, in the Ulyanovsk region, also in central Russia.
The deadliest shooting dates back to October 2018, when a high school student killed 19 people before killing himself in a high school in Kerch, in the annexed peninsula of Crimea.
Izhevsk, a city of nearly 650,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the Republic of Oudmurtia in the center of the country.
It was in this industrial city, long closed to foreigners during the communist era, that Mikhail Kalashnikov developed his first “AK-47” in 1947, which has since become world famous.