MOSCOW — A gunman killed six
people on a university campus in Russia on Monday before being detained,
investigators said, leaving students and teachers shaken and terrified.
اضافة اعلان
It was the second mass shooting in
Russia this year to target students and came amid calls for stricter controls
on access to firearms.
Video on social media showed
students throwing belongings from the windows of university buildings in the
city of Perm, around 1,300km east of Moscow, before jumping to flee the
shooter.
Witnesses described scenes of panic
at Perm State University, saying the city of around one million people was left
in shock by the tragedy.
State media broadcast amateur
footage reportedly taken during the attack showing an individual dressed in
black tactical clothing, including a helmet, carrying a weapon, and walking
through the campus.
The gunman, identified as a student
at the university, carried out the shooting with a hunting rifle he purchased
this year, according to Russia's Investigative Committee.
Ivan Pechishchev, a lecturer at the
university, said that when he saw students jumping out of windows he thought
there had been a fire.
Screaming and panic
"They were all in shock, there
was screaming, with everyone panicking and scared. I said 'What's going on?'"
and someone said there was a shooting, the lecturer told AFP.
Pechishchev, 39, said he hid with
students in an auditorium for more than an hour before they were told they
could leave the building.
"The city is shocked and
anxious. I walked home because it was impossible to get a taxi,"
Pechishchev said.
The Investigative Committee, which
probes major crimes in Russia, said 28 people were being treated after the
attack.
"Some of them have been
hospitalized with injuries of varying severity," it said in a statement.
According to unconfirmed reports,
five women and one man were killed in the shooting. Among them was a student,
who wanted to become a maths teacher, and a 66-year-old retired doctor, who was
visiting the university with her grandson.
Investigators said the gunman
resisted arrest and was wounded before being taken to a medical facility.
Junior police lieutenant Konstantin
Kalinin said he had to shoot the attacker after the man trained a rifle on him.
"After that, I gave him first
aid," the policeman said in remarks released by the interior ministry.
The health ministry said 19 among
the wounded were being treated for gunshots.
“A great loss”
President Vladimir Putin said the
deaths amounted to "a great loss, not only for the families who lost their
children but for the whole country.”
"No words can silence the grief
or pain of this loss, especially since we are talking about young people just
at the beginning of their lives," he said.
School shootings are relatively
unusual in Russia due to tight security at education facilities and because it
is difficult to buy firearms.
But Monday's attack was the second
this year, after a 19-year-old opened fire in his old school in the central
city of Kazan in May, killing nine people.
Investigators said the Kazan gunman
suffered from a brain disorder, but he was deemed fit to receive a license for
the semi-automatic shotgun he used in the attack.
On the day of that attack, Putin
called for a review of gun control laws. The age to acquire hunting rifles was
increased from 18 to 21 and medical checks were strengthened.
The Kremlin's spokesman Dmitry
Peskov said Monday that despite the tightened legislation "unfortunately,
this tragedy has happened, and it has to be analyzed".
"It looks like we are talking
about abnormalities in a young man who committed these killings," Peskov
added.
Authorities have 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 in the far eastern town of Blagoveshchensk opened fire at his college,
killing one classmate and injuring three other people before killing himself.
In October 2018, another teenage
gunman killed 20 people at a Kerch technical college in Crimea, the peninsula
Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
He was shown in-camera footage
wearing a similar T-shirt to Eric Harris, one of the killers in the 1999
Columbine High School shooting in the US, which left 13 people dead.
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