(FiveNation.com)- A law student at a Russian university killed at least eight people and wounded at least 24 during a shooting spree on campus on Monday. A spokeswoman from the university as well as government officials and state-run media confirmed the shooting on Monday.
The shooter was an 18-year-old law student at the school, Perm State University, which is located roughly 650 miles east of Moscow. When the shooting began, students barricaded themselves in the classrooms and waited while they heard screams and shooting bursting through the hallways.
Some students escaped the terror by jumping out of second-story windows and then running from the scene.
The shooter initially resisted arrest but was eventually wounded and was taken into custody, officials with law enforcement agencies confirmed.
School shootings aren’t very common in Russia, though they have become more frequent in recent years. Reports from the state media there said the shooter obtained the gun, which was a shotgun, in May through legal means. That was according to law enforcement agency the Investigative Committee.
This marks the second mass shooting at a school in Russia in 2021. Back in May, seven students as well as two employees of a school in Kazan were killed by a shooter.
The Kremlin only provided brief details about the incident. It said that the shooter was “likely disturbed,” but didn’t provide any details, including whether the shooting was politically motivated.
Aleksandr Khinshtein, a member of Russia’s parliament, identified the shooter as Timur Bekmansurov. He is an 18-year-old law student at the university.
Right before the attack happened on Monday, a post on social media that was attributed to the shooter was posted, and local media then published it. It was several pages in length, and talked about the shooter’s fascination with violence. The post didn’t make mention, or hint at, any political motive for the shooting.
Following the shooting, the social media company, Vkontakte, ended up blocking the person’s account.
The campus has roughly 13,000 students and has an alarm system that can alert students to danger. That system wasn’t activated right away, though, because the gunman shot a security guard whose job it was to activate the alert system.
One of the first officers who arrived at the scene was a traffic policeman who shot the attacker, wounding him, and then later detained the shooter. That man, Konstantin Kalinin, said in a video that was released by RIA:
“We saw how many people were running out of the university, fleeing the building, and shooting could be heard. I ran into the building on the first floor and saw how an armed young man was walking down the stairs. I yelled at him ‘drop it’ and the young man aimed his gun at me and fired. After that, I used my firearm.”
The officer luckily wasn’t wounded during the incident.
Doctors and emergency medical supplies were delivered to the university via a plane dispatched by the government on Monday.
