A 14-year-old girl opened fire at a school in southwestern Russia on Thursday, killing a classmate and wounding five other students before killing herself, investigators said in a statement.

"A 14-year-old girl has come to school with a shotgun, which she has used to shoot her classmates," Russia's Investigative Committee said.

"As a result, two people were killed – one of them the attacker – and five were injured," the agency said in its statement.

Authorities have not identified the shooter, but say the fatal victim is a classmate at her high school in a suburb of the city of Bryansk.

"The motives behind the crime and all the circumstances are being clarified," says the committee charged with investigating serious crimes.

The injured have been taken to medical facilities while Bryansk regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said the five were students at the school.

The shooting took place at school No. 5 in Bryansk, a city near Ukraine that has occasionally been the target of shelling and drone strikes from Kyiv.

Once very rare, deadly shootings have become more common in Russia in recent years.

In September last year, a gunman killed 18 people at a school in the western city of Izhevsk.

In 2021, a 19-year-old shooter killed nine people at a school in the southwestern city of Kazan.

That same year, a teenager shot dead six people at a university in the city of Perm, near the Urals.

According to the state-run Tass news agency, the author's father is being questioned by investigators. They "want to know how the gun was stored at home, how the girl was able to pick it up, and whether (the father) taught the girl how to shoot," a source in the security forces told Tass.

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