The World Briefly
September 27, 2022The Spreading Plague
Russia
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A gunman killed at least 17 people, including 11 children, at a school in central Russia on Monday, the latest school shooting in a country where such tragedies are relatively uncommon, the Washington Post reported.
The shooting took place in the Russian city of Izhevsk with officials saying that 23 people were injured during the incident.
Russian authorities identified the gunman as Artem Kazantsev, a 34-year-old local resident and former student at the school. They said the shooter was clad in black and was wearing a T-shirt with the Nazi swastika symbol at the time of the shooting.
Local media reported that Kazantsev was carrying two weapons and ammunition clips scrawled with the word “hatred” in red paint.
The two guns also had braided cords with the words “Columbine,” and “Dylan and Eric” – a reference to the perpetrators of the 1999 Columbine school shooting in Colorado orchestrated by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that left 15 people dead, including the two youths.
Authorities added that Kazantsev was registered with a psycho-neurological clinic and are investigating whether he was a member of any neo-Nazi group in the country.
The Russian government condemned the attack as “an inhuman act of terrorism.”
The attack comes amid a wave of violence in Russia otherwise sparked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s institution of a partial draft to shore up troops in Ukraine. On Monday, a young Russian man shot the chief of a local military enlistment office in the Siberian region of Irkutsk.
Although the school shooting doesn’t appear to be connected to the call to arms, Monday’s shooting is the third school massacre in Russia since May 2021.
In May 2021, gunman Ilnaz Galyaviev killed nine people including seven children at a school in Kazan, Tatarstan. A few months later, an 18-year-old university student killed six people and injured 47 others at Perm State University near the Ural Mountains in western Russia.
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