Several killed in Siberian university shooting

A gunman opened fire at a university in the Russian city of Perm on Monday morning, leaving several people dead and wounded, Russia’s Investigative Committee said.

The gunman, who was a student at the university, was later detained, Russia’s Interior Ministry and a spokesman from Perm State National Research University said.

Officials said that the gunman was killed following the shooting. “He was liquidated,” Natalia Pechishcheva, a university spokesperson, said.

It is the second mass shooting at an education facility in Russia this year.

According to news reports, at least eight people died, and several were wounded.

The perpetrator, who was an 18-year-old student at the university, used a “traumatic” firearm, according to the Perm State University press service.

Such guns are designed to fire non-lethal rubber or plastic projectiles, but can be modified to fire other ammunition.

The student had earlier posted a social media photo of himself posing with a rifle, helmet and ammunition.

“I’ve thought about this for a long time, it’s been years and I realized the time had come to do what I dreamt of,” he said on a social media account attributed to him that was later taken down, Deutsche Welle reported.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the victims sustained injuries from the shooting or from trying to escape the building.

Footage from the scene showed students jumping from first-floor windows to escape the building, landing heavily on the ground before running to safety.

“There were about 60 people in the classroom. We closed the door and barricaded it with chairs,” student Semyon Karyakin told Reuters..

Russia has relatively few school shootings due to normally tight security in educational institutions and gun ownership laws.

Earlier this year, a lone teenage gunman opened fire at a school in the city of Kazan in May, killing nine people and wounding several more. It was Russia’s deadliest school shooting since 2018, when a student at a college in Crimea killed 20 people before killing himself.