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Russians gathered outside a university in the city of Perm where the shooting took place.
Moscow:
Shocked and grieving Russians gathered outside a university in the city of Perm on Tuesday after a student surrendered to a campus shootout, killing six people and injuring dozens.
With a heavy police cordon still around Perm State University a day after the murders, they laid red carnations and lit candles at makeshift memorials.
Ksenia Punina, professor of international relations at the university, told AFP she was in shock and pain at the start of an official day of mourning following the attack.
“Our university is our home,” said the 40-year-old woman, wearing a black mask bearing the university’s name.
“It’s completely unexpected; a total shock when a man walks into your house with a gun to your family.”
On Monday morning, a college student wearing black tactical gear and a helmet walked around the densely populated campus, wielding a shotgun and shooting people in its path.
He was eventually confronted by the police and injured while in detention, then hospitalized.
There is no indication of the reason for the attack at this time.
The rampage caused chaos on campus, with images on social media showing dozens of students jumping out of windows to escape the attacker.
President Vladimir Putin called the incident, which claimed the lives of a man and five women aged 18 to 66, “a great loss” for the whole country.
As of Tuesday morning, police closed the mostly Soviet-era university buildings with the exception of senior officials.
The attack on Perm, some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from Moscow, was the second mass shootout targeting students in Russia this year, and has attracted increasing attention to gun control laws.
“Important to be together”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that legislative measures had already been taken to further restrict the purchase of firearms since the first bombing this year in the city of Kazan, which left nine dead .
He said authorities would analyze what happened this time.
Investigators said the student who fired on Monday legally obtained the shotgun earlier this year.
Of about two dozen people injured in the attack, nine were in critical condition, said Health Minister Mikhail Murashko, who was dispatched to the scene to coordinate a response.
Local media said Education Minister Valery Falkov visited injured students in hospital on Monday evening and those in need of more intensive care would be taken to Moscow.
One of Punina’s students was among those seriously injured, she told an AFP reporter at the memorial, and had undergone surgery after being shot in the stomach.
“We really hope that everything will be fine for her,” she said.
Ekaterina Nabatova, a former student who came to pay tribute to her, said some of her former professors and classmates now working at the university were on campus during the attack.
“They were all there yesterday,” she said. “It’s very hard for the whole city. It’s important for us to be together today.
Authorities blamed foreign influence for previous school shootings, saying young Russians have been exposed online and on television to similar attacks in the United States and elsewhere.
In November 2019, a 19-year-old student from the Far Eastern town of Blagoveshchensk opened fire on his college, killing a classmate and injuring three others before committing suicide.
In October 2018, another armed teenager killed 20 people at a technical college in Kerch in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia annexed to Ukraine in 2014.
He was shown in camera footage wearing a T-shirt similar to that of Eric Harris, one of the killers in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in the United States, which left 13 dead.
(This story was not edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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