Crimea college attack kills 18

MOSCOW: Eighteen people were killed and dozens injured at a college in the Black Sea region of Crimea yesterday when at least one attacker set off a bomb in the cafeteria and went through the building shooting at random, officials said.

Law enforcement officials said they were treating the incident, in which many of the victims were teenage students, as a terrorist attack.

Sergei Aksyonov, the head of the Russian-backed administration in Crimea, a region Moscow annexed from Ukraine four years ago, said the main suspect was a male student at the college and that he had killed himself.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the military was sending forces and supplies to help the victims.

Aksyonov, the regional head, told Russian state television that the death toll from the attack stood at 18, up from a previous estimate of 13.

Olga Grebennikova, the college’s director, described a scene of bloodshed at the college.

“There are bodies everywhere, children’s bodies everywhere. It was a real act of terrorism. They burst in five or 10 minutes after I’d left. They blew up everything in the hall, glass was flying,” Grebennikova told Crimean media outlets.

“They then ran about throwing some kind of explosives around, and then ran around the second floor with guns, opened the office doors, and killed anyone they could find.”

The Investigative Committee, the law enforcement body that investigates major crimes, said initial information was that an explosive device packed with metal objects had gone off in the cafeteria. It said 50 people were wounded in the attack.

Russian news agencies quoted a senior official with Russia’s National Guard as saying that the attack was being treated as terrorism.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Anastasia Yenshina, a 15-yearold student at the college, said she was in a toilet on the ground floor when she heard the sound of an explosion.