Student kills 19 in rare Russian attack

An 18-year-old student strode into his vocational school in Crimea, a hoodie covering his blond hair, then pulled out a shotgun and opened fire, killing 19 students and wounding more than 50 others before killing himself.

It wasn’t clear just what prompted Vladislav Roslyakov, described as a shy loner, to go on the rampage. A security camera image carried by Russian media showed him calmly walking down the stairs of the school 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 fourthyear student killed himself in the library of the Kerch Polytechnic College after the attack. His mother, a nurse, was helping to treat victims at a local hospital after the shootings, unaware yet that her son was accused of the rampage and was already dead.

Such school shootings are rare in Russia, and yesterday’s was by far the worst by a disgruntled student in Russia, which annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. .

Crimean authorities said the death toll stood at 19, apparently not including the shooter. Fifty-three people were wounded.

It was the greatest loss of life in school violence in Russia since the Beslan terrorist attack by Chechen separatists in 2004, in which 333 people were killed during a three-day siege, many of them children, and hundreds were wounded.

The announcement that the shooter in Crimea was a student who acted alone came after hours of rapidly shifting explanations. Officials at first reported a gas explosion, then said an explosive device had ripped through the cafeteria in a suspected terrorist attack. Witnesses, however, reported that victims were being killed by gunfire. Russia’s top crime investigation agency eventually said all the victims died of gunshot wounds.