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 later detained the suspected shooter’s father for questioning, according to the state-run news agency TASS.
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.
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