A student armed with a hunting rifle opened fire on a university in the Russian city of Perm on Monday 20, killing at least eight people and injuring many more, investigators said.
The attacker has been identified as one Timur Bekmansurov, a student of the same university.
Video shown on news sites showed panicked students jumping out of first-floor windows to escape Perm State University, about 1,300 km (800 miles) east of Moscow, landing heavily on the ground before running to safety.
“There were about 60 people in our classroom. We closed the door and barricaded it with chairs,” student Semyon Karyakin told Reuters.
The sniper was wounded after resisting arrest and was being treated at a hospital, the Investigation Committee’s police agency said in a statement.
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University spokeswoman Natalia Pechishcheva previously said the sniper had been “liquidated” but later said he was in police custody. The footage from the scene shows his body lying on the ground outside the university building.
The Investigative Committee had initially said that eight people had died.
The sniper was identified as a university student who had obtained the hunting rifle in May, the newspaper said.
Local media identified the shooter as an 18-year-old student who had previously posted a picture of himself on social media, posing with a rifle, helmet and ammo. This photo could not be independently verified.
“I’ve thought about this for a long time, it’s been years, and I realized it was time for what I dreamed of,” said a post on a social media account attributed to him that was later withdrawn.
This indicated that his actions had nothing to do with politics or religion, but were motivated by hatred.
In May, a lone sniper teenager opened fire on a school in the city of Kazan, killing nine people and injuring many more.
It was Russia’s deadliest school shooting since 2018, when a student at a college in Russia-annexed Crimea killed 20 people before pointing his gun at himself.
Russia raised the minimum age for buying weapons from 18 to 21 after the shooting in Kazan, but the new law has yet to take effect.
