The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case on the murder after a shooting in a kindergarten in the village of Veshkayma in the Ulyanovsk region, according to the department's Telegram channel.
The victims of the shooter were a teacher and two children: a six-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy.
Another employee of the kindergarten was injured.
According to RT sources in law enforcement agencies, the attack was carried out by 26-year-old local resident Ruslan Akhtyamov.
On April 26, at 13:05, he came to the Ryabinka kindergarten with an Izh-27 gun in his hands.
The teacher's assistant Elena Karpova was the first to run into him - she was cleaning on the porch of the kindergarten when a man appeared and shot her in the arm.
The victim wanted to warn colleagues and wards about the attack and told them to hide on the second floor.
Meanwhile, the man entered the building, the teacher Olga Mitrofanova tried to stop him.
She became the first victim of Akhtyamov.
Having dealt with the teacher, the shooter went into the bedroom, where there were small children, and killed two kindergarten students, after which he sat on one of the beds and committed suicide.
The police officers who arrived at the scene took everyone out of the building, after the tragedy the second kindergarten in the village was also evacuated.
The man who attacked Ryabinka was seized the Izh-27 rifle, registered to Alexander Dronin, a 68-year-old resident of Veshkaima.
One of the residents of the village told RT that his four-year-old grandson was in kindergarten when the attack occurred.
At the time of the shooting, the boy was in the other wing of the building.
“My wife called and said what happened here.
I immediately ran here, there were already a lot of people, my daughter came for her grandson.
The evacuation began, parents were allowed in one at a time, they took the children out.
We took our grandson, he was not only scared, but, you know, there are a lot of people, and because of his age, he doesn’t quite understand everything, ”said the man.
The interlocutor of RT added that he knew Alexander Dronin, the owner of the gun from which the attacker fired.
According to the man, Dronin once headed the local collective farm.
Initially, the media wrote that the attacker was probably Dronin, who owned the gun.
Interfax sources reported that the weapon was acquired legally and was registered by the owner.
But the man who carried out the execution in the kindergarten did not fit the description of the 68-year-old pensioner.
Soon, the attacker was identified by his mother, who recognized her son, 26-year-old Ruslan Akhtyamov, by the clothes in the photo from the scene that appeared on social networks.
Investigators are now working with the woman.
Law enforcement agencies also started looking for Alexander Dronin, who owned the gun.
His Niva disappeared, and the pensioner himself did not get in touch, and soon law enforcement officers found his body with gunshot wounds in a landfill in a forest belt near the kindergarten that Akhtyamov shot.
It turned out that on the day of the attack on the Ryabinka kindergarten, Alexander Dronin drove into the forest in his Niva with his neighbor, the father of Ruslan Akhtyamov.
Ruslan went with them.
The men planned to shoot in the forest with the hunting rifle of Dronin, an experienced hunter.
According to the preliminary version, in the forest, Akhtyamov Jr. took possession of a weapon and shot a pensioner, after which he got rid of the corpse and went to a kindergarten in Veshkaym, where he committed a massacre.
Father Ruslan Akhtyamov, who allegedly went to the forest with his son and Alexander Dronin, has not yet been found.
The police do not rule out that the man was also killed.
So far, nothing is known about Akhtyamov's motives.
According to local media, he lived not far from the crime scene - on the street 50 years of the USSR, the Ryabinka kindergarten is also located there.
According to some reports, Ruslan Akhtyamov was registered in a psycho-neurological dispensary, and his acquaintances told local journalists that he was a closed, closed person.
Help for the families of the victims
Due to the tragedy in Veshkaim, the governor of the Ulyanovsk region, Alexei Russkikh, urgently interrupted his working trip to Tashkent and went to Ulyanovsk on the very first flight, which he announced in his VKontakte account.
The head of the region expressed his condolences to the families of those killed and promised to provide assistance to all victims of the tragedy.
“Now all operational services are working on the spot.
On my instructions, the families of the victims will be provided with comprehensive assistance: medical, psychological and social.
Psychologists work with victims.
Deputy governors Igor Edel and Alexander Korobko left for the place, heads of relevant departments are working with them.
I urgently interrupted my working trip to Innoprom in Tashkent, I'm flying on the next flight to Ulyanovsk," Russkikh said.
Tatyana Moskalkova, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, also expressed her condolences in connection with the tragedy in Veshkaym.
In her Telegram channel, the Ombudsman spoke about the condition of the junior kindergarten teacher Elena Karpova, who ended up in the hospital after the attack by Ruslan Akhtyamov.
“The victim is in the emergency room of the district hospital with a fracture of both bones of the forearm, a gunshot (shot) wound to the right shoulder.
The condition is stable.
It is preparing to be transferred to the level of the regional hospital,” the Ombudsman wrote.
Moskalkova recalled that the tragedy in Ulyanovsk is not the first case of an armed attack on children's and educational institutions in Russia, and called for strengthening measures to protect schools, colleges and kindergartens.
“This extremely responsible task should lie with the private security officers of the Russian Guard, who should be on duty in preschool and school institutions around the clock,” Moskalkova stressed.