A 14-year-old girl opened fire Thursday at a school in Bryansk, a city in western Russia, killing a classmate with a shotgun blast and injuring five other students before committing suicide. Once extremely rare, fatal shootings, particularly in schools, have tended to become more numerous in Russia in recent years.
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. “A 14-year-old girl came to school with a shotgun, shooting at her classmates” and killing one of them, a statement from the Investigative Committee of Russia said Thursday morning. 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 gun with her into 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. With shootings of this type increasing in Russia in recent years, the authorities have reacted by tightening the legislation on the carrying of weapons, which is 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 six 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 Vladimir Putin blamed “globalization”, believing that the phenomenon of school shootings came from the United States.