Day of mourning after school shooting

MOSCOW: mourners laid flowers yesterday at the gates of a Russian school where a day earlier a lone gunman killed nine people, mostly children, in one of the country’s worst shooting incidents history.

Flags were flown at half-mast on official buildings yesterday, an official day of mourning, while funerals were planned for some of the dead later in the day.

Flowers were piled high outside School No. 175 in Kazan, the capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Tatarstan, where the shooting took place.

“This is a huge and unexpected loss,” Irina Krasnikova, 42, told AFP.

“We live in such a nice city. It’s hard to believe this happened to us… It didn’t happen to my children, but it is so painful, it’s hard to speak”.