Massacre at Crimea school
An 18-year-old student walked into his vocational school in Crimea on Wednesday, pulled out a shotgun and opened fire, killing 19 people and wounding more than 50 others before fatally shooting himself.
Authorities don’t know why Vladislav Roslyakov went on the rampage.
A security-camera image shows him calmly walking down the stairs of the Kerch Polytechnic College in the Black Sea city of Kerch, the shotgun in his gloved hand.
“He was walking around and shooting students and teachers in cold blood,” said Sergei Aksyonov, the regional leader in Crimea.
Officials said the fourth-year student killed himself in the school library after the attack. At one point Wednesday, his mother, a nurse, was helping to treat victims at a local hospital, unaware that her son was accused of the rampage and was already dead, officials said.
It was the greatest loss of life in school violence in Russia since the 2004 Beslan terrorist attack by Chechen separatists, in which 333 people, many of them children, were killed.
Some Russian news reports said Roslyakov had left his backpack containing an explosive device in the cafeteria and remotely detonated it before he started shooting.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.