An unidentified attacker opened fire in a Russian school, killing 17 people and leaving 24 injured. During the investigation, the attacker was identified as Artem Kazantsev, aged almost 30 years. First, he killed two security guards and entered school number 88, where he was a pupil. Then he opened fire on the school teacher and the children. Russia’s investigation committee, an expert in handling major crimes, stated that the attacker had connections with Neo-Nazi. After the incident, the attacker killed himself.
The committee stated that investigators are currently searching his apartments and trying to analyse the attacker’s mentality, opinions, intentions and on whom orders he did this terrifying act. In a video released by police, the man’s body is shown lying in a classroom with documents and furniture on the blood-stained floor. He wore just black clothing, and his T-shirt bore a crimson swastika drawn in a circle.
Alexander Brechalov, the regional governor, reported that surgeons had performed several surgeries on injured victims. He also informed that the attacker also registered with a psycho-neurological treatment facility. During the incident, the attacker was armed with two 9mm pistols and a high amount of ammunition.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, reported that Vladimir Putin has deeply mourned the deaths. President sent his condolences to the victim’s relatives. According to him, Putin had ordered the dispatch of medical professionals to the shooting scene in Izhevsk, roughly 600 miles east of Moscow, including physicians, psychiatrists, and neurosurgeons. Putin addressed this incident as a terrorist act by a person who belongs to a neo-fascist terrorist organisation or group.
This is not the first time Russia has experienced a terrorist attack on schools. In Kazan, Russia, in May 2021, a young gunman killed two adults and seven children. At least six people were killed by a student carrying a hunting rifle in September of last year at a university in Perm, a city in the Urals.
A gunman attacked a kindergarten in the centre of Ulyanovsk in April 2022, killing two children and a teacher before turning the gun on himself.
Twenty people, primarily classmates, were killed in a mass shooting in 2018 by an 18-year-old student at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
