12 LEFT WOUNDED AT RUSSIAN SCHOOL OVER KNIFE ATTACK...
12 LEFT WOUNDED AT RUSSIAN SCHOOL OVER KNIFE ATTACK...
Two masked teenagers armed with knives stormed a school in the
central Russian city of Perm on Monday, wounding at least 12 people, most of
them elementary school students.
A teacher and a 16-year-old pupil who tried to intervene sustained serious stab wounds to
the neck, officials said. The two youths — one said to be a current student,
the other a former student who was expelled — entered School 127, in the
Motovilikhinsky district around 10 a.m. They came in through a back entrance,
unnoticed by a security guard, and broke into a fourth-grade classroom, local
news outlets reported.
One assailant pounced on students
while the other blocked the classroom door, a witness told the newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda. “They said they’re going to slaughter everyone. We
initially thought it was a joke,” the Perm news site 59.ru quoted another as saying.
Within 10 minutes, the school was evacuated and eight ambulances
arrived, the Perm region’s Health Ministry said in a statement. Twelve people
were hospitalized, including two children and a teacher with serious stab
wounds; nine children ages 10 and 11 sustained minor wounds, the statement
said. A teacher, who tried to intervene,
identified by local news outlets as Natalya Shagulina, was reported to be
undergoing emergency surgery after heavy blood loss, the RBC newspaper
reported. The two assailants were also wounded.
Two suspects were detained,
although the motives for the attack were not immediately clear. A social media
profile that local news outlets said ws linked to one of the suspects contained
dozens of posts about the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, in which two teenagers armed
with guns and explosives killed 12 students and a teacher, before killing
themselves. The profile, on the Russian social media platform VK, also links to
a group called “(School)shooters”, which comes with the disclaimer: “We do not
advocate violence and we detest it in any form. We are simply a fact-finding
group for information-gathering purposes. (18+).” The police in Perm, in the
Ural Mountains, said in a statement that one of the assailants was a patient at
a local mental hospital.
The Perm attack followed a spate of similar ones across Russia
in recent months, which have prompted a debate about security measures at the
country’s schools and universities. On Sept. 5, four pupils were wounded at a
school outside Moscow after a student attacked a teacher with a kitchen knife
and then opened fire with an air gun. The 15-year-old assailant had also posted
about the Columbine School massacre on social media, the Russian news
media reported at the time. On Nov. 1, an
18-year-old college student in Moscow stabbed a teacher to death and posted selfies with the body on social
media.
Guns are difficult to purchase legally in Russia. Responding to
the Perm attack, Russia’s ombudsman for children, Anna Kuznetsova, criticized
in a Facebook post the security measures in
place at the school. “Can it really be that no one was there to stop the
hooligans other than 10-year-old children? What about the prevention systems in
place?” she said. “Where was all this??!! I have a lot of question..Dmitry S.
Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, said that it
was too early to say if any changes to security measures at Russian schools
would be required.
“Let’s wait to hear from the experts and not engage in
amateurish speculation,” he said.
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