School shooting in Russia: a 14-year-old girl kills a friend before committing suicide
A 14-year-old girl opened fire Thursday at a school in Bryansk, a city in western Russia, killing a fellow student with a shotgun blast and injuring five other students before committing suicide.
President Vladimir Putin has been alarmed by this in the past, seeing it as a phenomenon imported from the United States and a perverse effect of globalization.
According to the police in Bryansk, a region bordering Ukraine, the shooter “committed suicide” after opening fire on her comrades.
“The motives and circumstances” of the tragedy are being established, said the police, who gave no indication of the shooter’s motivations.
“A terrible tragedy occurred today in school number 5 in Bryansk. One of the students brought a firearm with her to the school,” the regional governor wrote on Telegram, Alexandre Bogomaz.
According to him, the five injured are children who were hospitalized. Two of them were slightly injured and three others had moderate injuries.
“My sincere condolences to the parents of the young girl killed by the shooter. It is an irreplaceable loss. The families of the young girl killed and those of the injured will benefit from all the help they need,” he said. added.
– The father heard –
According to the state agency Tass, the father of the shooter was interviewed by investigators. They “are trying to find out how the weapon was stored at home, how the child was able to take it, and if (the father) taught the young girl how to shoot,” said a source within the forces. order in Tass.
Shootings of this type have increased in Russia in recent yearsthe authorities reacted by tightening the legislation on the carrying of weapons, although it was already very restrictive.
In September 2022, fifteen people were killed, including 11 children, during a shooting at a school in Izhevsk, in central Russia, by a former student of the establishment.
In April 2022, a man opened fire in a nursery school and killed two children as well as a teacher, before committing suicide, in the Ulyanovsk region, also in central Russia.
In September 2021, a 19-year-old student killed 6 people at Perm University. Having survived, he was tried and sentenced in December 2022 to life in prison.
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, on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.
It was after this tragedy that Mr. Putin blamed “globalization”, believing that the phenomenon of school shootings came from the United States.