At least 15 people were killed, including eleven children, in a shooting at a school in Izhevsk, central Russia. “As a result of the crime, 15 people died, including eleven children and four adults (and) 24 others injured, including 22 children and 2 adults,” the Investigation Committee said in the afternoon, reviewing its previous assessment. on the rise. “The President (Vladimir Putin) deeply regrets the death of people and children in this school where a terrorist attack was perpetrated,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“The president wishes healing to those injured in this inhuman attack,” added the Kremlin. The suspect was wearing a “black Nazi symbolism sweater and a balaclava”, added the same source, adding that “his identity is being established”.
The assailant allegedly committed suicide
A previous report from the Russian Investigation Committee reported nine victims, including five children. Investigators also released a video showing the body of an individual lying on the ground, blood around the skull and wearing a black sweater with a red swastika on it. Earlier, the Russian Interior Ministry had mentioned six victims and 20 injured. “The police have found the body of the man who opened fire. According to our information, he committed suicide,” he added.
The governor of the region, Alexander Bretchalov, for his part indicated that “there are victims among the children and the wounded”, visibly moved, in a video published on Telegram. He was speaking outside School No. 88 in Izhevsk. Behind him, medical personnel could be seen running into the building, some carrying a stretcher. The school’s website indicates that it has nearly a thousand students and 80 teachers. The facts took place in the morning in this city just west of the Ural massif, a mountain range that separates European and Asian Russia. This city still houses the factories manufacturing Kalashnikov assault rifles.
According to Alexander Bretchalov, “an unidentified person entered the school” before “killing the guard” and opening fire inside the school. “The evacuation is complete” and “the entire perimeter is cordoned off”, he assured in his video, specifying that the Russian National Guard, the FSB security services and “the authorities in charge of the investigation” were already there. According to the Ministry of Health, “14 ambulance teams” are also on the site and “a group of doctors” is due to go to Izhevsk soon “to help the victims”. An investigation for “murder” and “illegal carrying of weapons” was quickly opened and transferred to the Investigative Committee of Russia, the main investigative body in the country.
Tense climate
Monday’s shooting comes in a tense climate in many regions of Russia, against a backdrop of military mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists for the Russian offensive in Ukraine. Also on Monday, a man opened fire at a Russian army recruitment center in Siberia, seriously injuring a soldier working there. Once extremely rare, fatal shootings, especially in schools, have tended to become more numerous in Russia in recent years, to the point that President Vladimir Putin has become alarmed, seeing it as a phenomenon imported from the United States and a perverse effect. of globalization, which led him to toughen the legislation on the carrying of arms.
In April, a man opened fire in a kindergarten and killed two children as well as a teacher, before committing suicide, in the Ulyanovsk region, also in central Russia. 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, in the annexed peninsula of Crimea. Ijevsk, a city of nearly 650,000 inhabitants, is the capital of the Republic of Oudmurtia in the center of the country. It was in this industrial city, long closed to foreigners during the communist era, that Mikhail Kalashnikov developed his first “AK-47” in 1947, which has since become world famous.