Moscow Times
written by Staff
Thursday December 7, 2023
A Russian teenager has shot dead a classmate and injured five others before killing herself at a school in western Russia, investigators said Thursday.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said a 14-year-old student who brought a pump-action shotgun to the school was among the dead.
The Investigative Committee said it had launched a criminal probe.
Russia’s government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta published footage from the scene of the shooting at Gymnasium No. 5 in the city of Bryansk, located just over 100 kilometers from the border with Ukraine.
“Someone from the eighth-grade shot and killed someone,” said one of the students who filmed a crowd of evacuees gathered outside the school.
Health officials said the five injured students had been hospitalized, adding that one of the victims of the attack was in “critical condition.”
Law enforcement authorities did not name the shooter, but they said they had detained her father for questioning, according to the state-run news agency TASS.
Bryansk Governor Oleg Bogomaz called Thursday's shooting a “terrible tragedy” and vowed to find out how the teenager was able to bring a gun into school and kill her classmate.
“The families of the killed girl and injured children will be provided all the necessary assistance,” Bogomaz said on the messaging app Telegram.
TASS quoted a source in the operational services as saying that the school's metal detectors had not been working, allowing the girl to enter the school with the shotgun and a knife unnoticed.
Mass shootings at schools and universities in Russia were rare until 2021, when the country was rocked by two separate killing sprees in the central Russian cities of Kazan and Perm that spurred lawmakers to tighten laws regulating access to guns.
At the time, President Vladimir Putin called for a review of gun control laws, and the minimum age to acquire hunting rifles was raised from 18 to 21 and mental health checks were tightened.
Authorities have blamed previous school shootings on foreign influences, arguing that young Russians have been exposed online and through television to similar attacks in the United States and elsewhere.
Reuters News
written by Mark Trevelyan
Thursday December 7, 2023
MOSCOW - A 14-year-old girl shot a fellow pupil dead and wounded five other children on Thursday before killing herself at a school in the Russian city of Bryansk, officials said.
"According to preliminary investigation data, a 14-year-old girl brought a pump-action shotgun to school, from which she fired shots at her classmates," Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Investigators were working to establish the motive, the statement said.
Regional governor Alexander Bogomaz called it a "terrible tragedy". He said the five people wounded were all children with mild or moderate injuries.
The news outlet Mash published what it said was a photograph of the dead shooter, sprawled on the floor and dressed all in black. It said she was also armed with a hunting knife.
The photo appeared to show a long-handled knife tucked into her right boot.
Guns are normally tightly controlled in Russia, but Bryansk is one of several southern regions that have seen cross-border attacks in the course of the war with Ukraine, and where Moscow has encouraged the formation of self-defence units.
"Together with law enforcement agencies, we are determining the circumstances under which the student was able to obtain and bring a weapon to school," Bogomaz said.
Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years.
In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly fellow pupils, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
In September last year, a gunman with a swastika on his teeshirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and wounded 24 at a school in Izhevsk where he had once been a pupil, and then committed suicide, investigators said.
BBC News
written by Staff
Thursday December 7, 2023
A teenage girl has shot and killed a fellow pupil in a school in western Russia before shooting herself.
The attack happened in the city of Bryansk, close to the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders, on Thursday morning.
Five people were injured in the shooting, one of them seriously, Russian authorities said.
The gun used by the girl was registered in her father's name, a parliamentarian said.
Police were called to Gymnasium No 5 in Bryansk at about 09:15 local time (06:15 GMT) on Thursday.
Alexey Kuznetsov, Russia's deputy health minister, said one victim was undergoing surgery.
Police say they believe the 14-year-old girl may have been involved in a conflict with classmates.
Students, teachers and parents at the school have been offered psychological support, journalists were told by the local authorities.
Alexander Khinshtein, a member of the Russian Duma, said on his Telegram account that the girl's belongings, including a box of bullets, were found during a search of the school.
Mr Khinshtein added that one of the reasons the tragedy occurred was the "neglectful attitude" towards the storage of the gun.
Russia has strict laws on guns, which need to be stored in a special safe, accessible only by the legal gun owner. It has to be regularly inspected by police.
Russian news agency RIA said students barricaded themselves in the classroom when they heard shots being fired.
"The boys barricaded the door with the desks, one girl called the police, the teacher was calling everyone else," RIA quoted one of the school girls.
The governor of the Bryansk region, Alexander Bogomaz, called the shooting a "terrible tragedy".
There have been several school shootings in Russia in recent years, although Thursday's incident is believed to be the first involving a female shooter.
In 2021, a 19-year-old killed seven children and two adults at a Kazan school.
The following year, 18 people were killed at a school in Udmurtia.
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