Perm in Russia: Several dead after being shot at the university

In an armed attack on the university in the Russian city of Perm on Monday, eight people were killed and others were wounded, according to preliminary information.

This was reported by the Interfax news agency, citing the region's investigative committee.

The shooter was wounded during arrest.

It was a student who opened fire on bystanders on the university campus.

The suspect's identity will now be clarified.

Several people are said to have been injured.

Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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From the university it was said that a stranger in a mask had shot.

Employees barricaded themselves in offices, and students were asked to lock themselves in their lecture halls.

Recordings of a person dressed in black with a rifle approaching a building that could be a Perm university building were distributed on Twitter, which were not verified for the specific medium.

Young voices swear fearfully.

Other shots show young people jumping out of windows.

The name of a young man who was 18 years old and who had committed the act was also mentioned; In addition, a picture was distributed in which an apparently young man is holding up the middle finger of his left hand and holding up a rifle in the other hand. He is dressed in black, has a black helmet and many cartridges in pods wound around his slim body. On the right side he wears what looks like a sword or baton.

As recently as May, nine people were killed in an attack on a school in Kazan; the perpetrator, a 19-year-old former student of the facility, had gone to school in black clothes and a black mask with a bag and a gun in his hand. After the crime, President Vladimir Putin ordered the gun law to be tightened. He had already done that after an 18-year-old vocational student in Kerch on the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea shot 20 classmates and then himself - with the same type of rifle that the young man in Kazan used. The tightening did not take place, instead, the age at which one can own hunting weapons was reduced to 16.