[ad_1]
MOSCOW – An 18-year-old student entered his vocational school in Crimea, a hoodie covering his blond hair, then pulled out a shotgun and opened fire on Wednesday, killing 19 students and injuring more than 50 people to kill himself.
It was unclear what prompted Vladislav Roslyakov, described as a shy loner, to go wild. An image of the security camera carried by the Russian media was calmly showing him down the stairs of the school in the city of Kerch (Black Sea), the shotgun in his hand in his gloved hand.
"He was walking around and firing on students and teachers," said Sergei Aksyonov, regional leader in Crimea.
Officials said that the fourth year student was killed in the Kerch Polytechnic College Library after the attack. Her mother, a nurse, was helping to treat the victims at a local hospital after the shooting, unaware that her son was accused of the rampage and was already dead.
These shootings in schools are rare and Wednesday's attack was by far the worst attack of an unhappy student in Russia, who annexed the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine in 2014. The bloodshed raised questions about the safety of schools in the country; the polytechnic college of Kerch only had a reception without security agents.
At the end of the day, the Crimean authorities said that the death toll was 19, apparently without the shooter. Fifty-three people were injured, including 12 in serious condition.
Violence in school has been the biggest loss of lives in Russia since the Beslan terrorist attack by Chechen separatists in 2004, during which 333 people were killed during a three-day siege, including many children and hundreds of wounded.
The announcement that the shooter in Wednesday's attack was a student acting alone came after hours of changing explanations about exactly what happened at school.
Authorities first reported a gas explosion and then said that an explosive device had passed through the cafeteria at lunch time as part of an alleged terrorist attack.
Witnesses, however, reported that victims had been shot dead. The Investigative Committee, the main Russian criminal investigation body, finally declared that all the victims had died from gunshot wounds.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the victims had been killed by an explosion just as the investigation committee announced that they had been shot dead.
Putin, with a dark face, deplored the attack, described as a "tragic event," and offered his condolences to the families of the victims at a press conference in Sochi, in the south of the country, where he had spoken with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
The investigation committee said that the explosive device with shrapnel had exploded in the school dining room and that Sergei Melikov, Deputy Chief of the Guard Russian national, had declared that it was homemade. The officials then discovered a second explosive device and destroyed it.
The nature of the explosive was unclear if the attacker blew him up or how many people he had been injured.
Firearms are strictly limited in Russia. Civilians may only possess shotguns and smooth-bore shotguns and must have a thorough background check. Roslyakov had only recently been allowed to own a shotgun and had bought 150 cartons just days ago, according to local authorities.
Aksyonov, the regional leader in Crimea, said the gunman was described as a shy, conflict-free boy.
"He was not aggressive, he was rather shy," said Aksyonov, speculating that Roslyakov would have "watched movies" that inspired him for the shooting.
Some Russian reports said that the shooter had left his backpack containing the explosive in the cafeteria and had it detonated remotely before he started firing.
"I heard an explosion and I saw shards of glass and window frames falling," said student Roman Voitenko in an address broadcast on Russian television.
Another student, Semyon Gavrilov, said to be asleep during a lecture and to have been awakened by the sound of the shooting. He looked around and saw a young man shoot people, he said.
"I locked the door hoping that he did not hear me," Gavrilov told Komsomolskaya newspaper Pravda.
He added that the police had arrived about 10 minutes later to evacuate people and that he had seen corpses on the ground and calcined walls.
Another student, Yuri Kerpek, told the official RIA Novosti news agency that the shooting had lasted about 15 minutes.
Russia has been the scene of several violent student attacks in recent years, but none of them has been as brutal as Kerch 's rampage.
Earlier this year, a teenager armed with an ax attacked his schoolmates from a Buryatia school in southern Siberia, injuring five students and a teacher. The attacker also set fire to an incendiary bomb in the class and attempted to commit suicide before being apprehended.
During another attack in January, two teenagers stabbed children and their teacher with knives, injuring 15 people, before attempting to kill each other before being arrested.
After Wednesday's attack, local authorities declared a state of emergency on the Black Sea peninsula and the ropes of the Russian National Guard encircled the school. Security has also been strengthened on a new 19 km bridge connecting the peninsula to Russia, which was inaugurated earlier this year. Military units were deployed near the college to assist emergency agencies.
The annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 triggered Western sanctions. Russia has also supported separatists fighting the Ukrainian government in eastern Ukraine, a conflict that has claimed at least 10,000 lives since 2014.
In recent years, Russian security agencies have arrested several Ukrainians accused of planning terrorist attacks in Crimea, but no attacks have taken place.
Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, disseminated, rewritten or redistributed.
[ad_2]Source link
