A gunman has opened fire at a school in central Russia, killing at least 15 people and injuring 24, Russian officials say.
Photo: Getty Images / Maria Baklanova
The victims include 11 children at the school of about 1000 pupils in the city of Izhevsk.
The gunman, a former pupil of the school, killed himself at the scene.
Videos posted online appear to show panic inside the building where the shooting took place, with children and adults running along corridors.
Other footage shows blood on a classroom floor and a bullet hole in a window, with children crouching down underneath desks.
Eleven children and four adults were killed, including two security guards and two teachers, according to Russia's investigative committee. All but two of the 24 injured people were children.
Staff and pupils were evacuated from the school building which is in central Izhevsk, a city of about 650,000 residents.
The attacker, named as Artem Kazantsev, is reported to have been armed with two pistols.
A video posted online by state investigators shows the dead body of the gunman on the floor, wearing a T-shirt with a Nazi symbol and a balaclava. Investigators are searching his place of residence.
A mourning period lasting until 29 September has been announced by the head of the region. Russian President Vladimir Putin is "deeply mourning" the deaths and denounced the shooting as an "inhuman terrorist attack", according to his spokesperson.
Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years.
In May 2021, a teenage gunman killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan. In September last year, a student armed with a hunting rifle shot dead at least six people at a university in the Urals city of Perm.
In April 2022, an armed man killed two children and a teacher at a kindergarten in the central Ulyanovsk region before committing suicide.
In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly fellow pupils, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The BBC reports previous attacks were carried out with legally-obtained hunting rifles, when getting a licence for such weapons was effectively easier than passing a driving test.
Since the Kazan school shooting in May 2021 and the Perm University attack that September, authorities had toughened the laws. But in this latest atrocity, the attacker used pistols which the BBC said he could only have got illegally on the black market.
- BBC / Reuters