14-Year-Old Girl In Russia Opens Fire At Classmates, Kills Self After Shooting One Dead

A 14-year-old girl in Russia shot dead one of her classmates and left five others wounded before killing herself on Thursday, state-affiliated media and authorities said. According to officials, the incident took place at a school in the Russian city of Bryansk. Preliminary probe has revealed that the schoolgirl was carrying a pump-action shotgun that she later used to shoot at her classmates,  Russia's Investigative Committee said.

Regional governor Alexander Bogomaz called it a "terrible tragedy". He said the five people wounded were all children with mild or moderate injuries. The news outlet Mash published what it said was a photograph of the dead shooter, sprawled on the floor and dressed all in black. It said she was also armed with a hunting knife. The photo appeared to show a long-handled knife tucked into her right boot.

Guns are normally tightly controlled in Russia, but Bryansk is one of several southern regions that have seen cross-border attacks in the course of the war with Ukraine, and where Moscow has encouraged the formation of self-defence units. "Together with law enforcement agencies, we are determining the circumstances under which the student was able to obtain and bring a weapon to school," Bogomaz said.

Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years. In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly fellow pupils, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014. In September last year, a gunman with a swastika on his teeshirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and wounded 24 at a school in Izhevsk where he had once been a pupil, and then committed suicide, investigators said.

(With inputs from Reuters)