In the latest attack on a school in Russia, yesterday an armed man caused a tragedy in Izhevsk, capital of the Republic of Udmurtia (Volga), and brings to mind those that have occurred in recent years in various regions. At least 15 people were killed, including 11 children, two security guards and two teachers, reported the Investigation Committee, which in Russia is in charge of investigating the most serious crimes.
Teachers and students were immediately evacuated, witnesses to the events said on various Telegram channels. The images spread by social networks show dozens of children and teachers leaving the school in fear, some of them bloodied; as well as students hidden in their classes. As usual in Russia, the center accommodates both primary and secondary school students, from the first grade to the 11th.
The governor of the region, Alexander Brechálov, confirmed visibly moved in a video that among the fatalities there were children and at least one security guard, the first one he killed by breaking into the school.
Investigators reported that the attack also left 24 injured, 22 of them minors. Some students who could not escape through the corridors jumped out of the windows and suffered various injuries and fractures.
A student at the Izhevsk school 88, where the tragedy occurred, told the Baza channel that she was in mathematics when she heard gunshots. The man shot at his teacher and then ran out of the classroom into the hallway yelling, “Where are you bastards?”
The author of the shooting was identified as Artyom Kazantsev, 34, and graduated from the same educational center. According to Governor Brechalov, he was registered as a patient in a psychiatric facility. Later, the Russian Minister of Education, Sergei Kravtsov, who arrived in the city together with the Minister of Health, Mikhail Murashko, and a team of doctors and psychologists to help the victims, told Tass that he had been diagnosed with “schizophrenia”.
The attacker burst into the center dressed in a black T-shirt with Nazi symbols and a balaclava.
The motives that instigated him to commit the massacre are unknown. After what happened, the investigators searched his home to gather more details and proceeded to “study the attacker’s personality, his points of view and his environment,” the Committee said. His sympathy with Nazi ideology is also being checked, he added.
Armed with two converted air guns and a large amount of ammunition, the attacker broke into one of the classrooms of the educational center and barricaded himself on the second floor, from where he fired at the approaching police officers. He made no claim.
On the magazines of a pistol, whose photos were published on social networks, you can read the word “hate” written in red paint.
The director had time to lock herself in her office with a teenager who had been injured.
Finally, the man ended up committing suicide. “The police have found the body of the man who had opened fire. According to our information, he has committed suicide, ”said the Russian Interior Ministry. Investigators released a short video showing the alleged attacker now deceased. In the recording, the body of the inert man is seen on the floor of a classroom, next to a pool of blood, and fallen furniture and papers scattered everywhere.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authorities “deeply regretted the death of people, children, at school,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov said, calling what happened a “terrorist attack, committed by a person who was apparently part of a neo-fascist organization or group”.
The tragedy in Izhevsk, a city of 640,000 inhabitants 960 kilometers east of Moscow, recalls two others suffered by Russia last year in two schools. In May 2021, an adolescent former student of a school in Kazan (Republic of Tatarstan) caused 9 deaths and 23 injuries. In September, a student attacked the university of Perm (Urals) killing six people and injuring fifty. And this same year, last April, a man killed two children and a teacher in a kindergarten in Ulyanovsk (Volga) before committing suicide.
