Eighteen people killed in armed attack on Crimean college
RUSSIA - 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 pupils, 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.
Video footage from the scene showed armored personnel carriers and military trucks lined up on the approach to the college, in the Crimean city of Kerch. Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the military was sending forces and supplies to help the victims.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, prompting international condemnation and Western sanctions. Since the operation to annex the peninsula, there have been no outbreaks of violence there. Aksyonov, the regional head, told Russian state television the death toll from the attack now stood at 18, up from a previous estimate of 13.
Olga Grebennikova, the college’s director, described a scene of bloodshed at the college, which provides vocational training. Its pupils are mostly teenagers.
“There are bodies everywhere, children’s bodies everywhere. It was a real act of terrorism. They burst in five or ten 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 of the college.
It said in a statement that there were around 50 people wounded in the attack.
(Reuters)