Perm University shooting six dead in Russia

Europe 1 with AFP 13:32, September 20, 2021

A student killed six people and left at least 28 injured in a shooting Monday at Perm State University, a city in the Urals in central Russia, before being injured by a police officer and arrested.

Armed incidents of this type have increased in Russia in recent years, leading to tougher laws on carrying weapons.

Amateur footage shows a man dressed all in black and wearing a helmet, walking gun in hand on college campus.

28 injured

"A student in one of the university buildings opened fire on people around. As a result, eight people died," the Russian Investigative Committee, the body responsible for the most important investigations, said in a statement. most important in the country.

Subsequently, the toll was revised to six dead.

At least 28 people were injured "some of whom were hospitalized with injuries of varying severity".

The author was also injured "during his arrest since he was putting up resistance and was then taken to hospital", added the Committee, which has so far not given information on the shooter's motive, nor his identity.

The Kremlin, for its part, indicated that the suspect was probably suffering from "psychic" problems.

According to the Investigation Committee, the suspect's weapon was a "smoothbore hunting rifle" which he acquired last May, before the laws on carrying weapons were tightened following a previous bloody shooting in school.

Author arrested

After having fired on the police, the author was wounded by the "response" of a police officer, according to the Ministry of the Interior, quoted by the Russian agencies.

Fleeing the shooting, students jumped from the windows of the first floor of a university building, according to videos posted on social media.

Another video, shot from a window, shows an individual dressed in black, his face hooded and helmeted, walking towards the entrance of a building, loading a rifle and carrying a satchel.

The assailant entered the campus at around 11 a.m. local time, according to the university press service.

Russian presidency spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Vladimir Putin, who is currently in quarantine after the discovery of a Covid outbreak in the Kremlin, was expressing "his deep condolences" to the relatives of the victims.

"He is obviously a young man with mental health problems," Dmitry Peskov said of the suspect.

More and more shootings in Russia

Shootings in educational institutions were rare in Russia for a long time, but they have tended to become more numerous, President Vladimir Putin even denouncing a phenomenon imported from the United States, a perverse effect of globalization. The last such deadly event, on May 11, 2021, a 19-year-old young man opened fire at his old school in Kazan, in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, killing nine people.

The same day, the Russian president ordered a review of the rules concerning the carrying of weapons.

The perpetrator of the attack in Kazan had been arrested.

He had a license for a semi-automatic weapon and appeared to be off balance, claiming to be a god.

With these reforms, the age for acquiring hunting weapons was raised from 18 to 21, as was already the case for conventional weapons, and a reinforced medical examination was introduced.

The most serious shooting dates back to October 2018, when a high school student killed 19 people before killing himself in a high school in Kerch, a city on the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia.

In recent years, authorities have also claimed to have foiled dozens of similar projects, often involving adolescents.