A man opened fire at a kindergarten on Tuesday and killed two children and a teacher before committing suicide in the Ulyanovsk region of central Russia, regional authorities said.
“A tragedy took place in the Riabinka kindergarten in Vechkaima: two children and a teacher died and another teacher was injured,” regional governor Alexei Rousskikh wrote on his Telegram account.
“An unknown person armed with a firearm entered the kindergarten in the village of Vechkaima during siesta time and killed three people, including two children”, according to the regional Ministry of Education, which specifies that “the motive for the crime remains to be established”.
Kremlin Human Rights Commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova identified the shooter as Rouslan Akhtyamov, a 26-year-old mentally ill man. The children killed are a girl and a boy born in 2016 and 2017, she added.
After killing his victims, the man “shot himself (a bullet) in the face” with a shotgun that belonged to another person, Ms Moskalkova added on Telegram. The owner of the gun was soon found dead, according to regional deputy governor Alexander Korobko.
The assassin “had no relationship” with the victims, according to local human rights delegate Sergey Lulkov, quoted by the Interfax news agency.
Formerly extremely rare, fatal shootings, especially in schools, have tended to become more numerous in Russia in recent years, to the point that President Vladimir Putin is alarmed, seeing in it a phenomenon imported from the United States and a perverse effect of globalization, which led him to toughen the legislation on the carrying of arms.
In September 2021, an 18-year-old student opened fire with a shotgun at Perm University in the Urals, killing six and wounding around 30. In May 2021, a 19-year-old shot at his old school, killing seven students and two teachers. The deadliest shooting dates back to October 2018, when a high school student killed 19 people before killing himself at a high school in Kerch, on the annexed Crimean peninsula.
A man opened fire on Tuesday in a kindergarten and killed two children and a teacher, before committing suicide in the Ulyanovsk region, in central Russia, regional authorities said.
“A tragedy took place in the Riabinka kindergarten in Vechkaima: two children and a teacher died and another teacher was injured,” said…