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MOSCOW – A single armed suicide man attacked his comrades from a technical college on the Crimean peninsula on Wednesday, killing at least 19 people and injuring dozens, the Russian authorities said.
The gunman, who also exploded an explosive device, was found dead, apparently a suicide.
The assault at Kerch Polytechnic College had been investigated as a potential terrorist attack. But officials quickly described him as murder after learning that the shooter, 18-year-old Vladislav I. Roslyakov, was a fourth-year college student.
No immediate motive was reported, but a friend of Mr. Roslyakov said he was a loner who had been interested in shooting at a school in 1999 in Columbine, Colorado, where 12 students and one teacher had been killed.
The body of Mr. Roslyakov was found shot and wounded in a college room, the Russian investigative committee said in a statement, bringing the death toll to 20. This is the largest loss of life due to school violence in Russia since the September 2004 Beslan terrorist attack, in which 333 people died, including many children, and 531 were hospitalized.
School shootings are rare in Russia and none have reached Wednesday's bloodbath. In The only recent case, an isolated armed man opened fire in a Moscow high school in 2014, killing a teacher and a police officer.
The victims have all died from gunshot wounds, according to the investigation committee, charged with investigating all the notorious crimes committed in the country. The Crimean Ministry of Health said 37 people had been hospitalized.
President Vladimir V. Putin, who described the attack as "tragic event", observed a minute of silence for the victims at an official ceremony he attended with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in the seaside resort of Sochi.
"It is already clear that it was a crime and the motives and versions of what happened are the subject of careful study" , did he declare.
Daniil Pyatkov, 17, a student at the school, said people on campus were starting to panic, realizing that they were being attacked.
He ran in search of his girlfriend, whom he knew was in the building under assault, he said in an interview with VKontakte, the media platform. Russian social networks.
"The main hall was all smoked, all the glass was broken, there were corpses, wounded everywhere," he said. "I thought it was a dream."
The student found his girlfriend at the front of the building, covered with blood and with a broken leg. He said that he had picked her up and had run as fast and as far as possible from the building.
Mr Pyatkov said he saw a picture of the student who allegedly committed the attack, but that it was not something that he had already seen before.
Denis Y. Gridchin, the shooter's friend, said Mr. Roslyakov
also had a dark vision of his own prospects, with only a technical background. "He did not see a future for himself," said Gridchin, also speaking about Vkontakte. He complained of lack of hope for a resident of a small town without education.
Mr. Roslyakov lived with his mother, who works as a nurse in a hospital in Kerch. According to local reports, the mother was treating the patients of the shooting, apparently unaware of her son's involvement, when the investigators came to the hospital to find her.
College principal Olga Grebennikoba described a carnage scene in the school cafeteria. The assailant first set in motion the explosive device that broke the windows, then indiscriminately fired on the students in the room at lunchtime.
"There are a lot of corpses, a lot of kids," Grebennikoba told a local television channel. "Children are dead, staff members are dead."
Television footage taken on the site of the explosion showed the green campus swarming ambulances and other vehicles to transport the victims to the hospital. A bloody and mutilated victim was transported to the back of an open truck, while another stretcher was pushed into a small bus.
Kerch, at the eastern end of Crimea, is the landing point of the Kerch Bridge, a $ 7 billion, 12-mile link Putin inaugurated last May. The construction, countered by Ukraine, was fraught with symbolism as it provided a physical connection with Russia, which annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
The euphoria that accompanied the annexation of Russia has long given way to resentment, even among the pro-Russian majority. Annexation has always been anathema to native Tatars, who have complained bitterly in recent years of widespread discrimination, including the establishment of a legislative body and independent media.
As part of the process of repressing critics, Russia has imposed long prison sentences on some people arrested for terrorism and has led many others to seek refuge in Ukraine, a neighboring country.
