Student Gunman Kills 19 and Wounds Dozens at a College in Crimea

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Emergency workers loading an injured person into an ambulance on Wednesday in Kerch, eastern Crimea.CreditCreditKerch Fm, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Neil MacFarquhar

Oct. 17, 2018

MOSCOW — A lone suicide gunman attacked his fellow students at a technical college on the Crimean peninsula on Wednesday, killing at least 19 people and wounding dozens of others, the Russian authorities said.

The gunman, who also detonated an explosive device, was found dead, apparently a suicide.

The assault at Kerch Polytechnic College was initially investigated as a possible terrorist attack. But officials quickly reclassified it as murder after learning that the gunman, Vladislav I. Roslyakov, 18, was a fourth-year student at the college.

There were no immediate reports of a possible motive, though a friend of Mr. Roslyakov said that he was a loner who had expressed an interest in the 1999 school shooting in Columbine, Colo., where 12 students and a teacher were killed.

Mr. Roslyakov’s body was found with a gunshot wound in a room at the college, Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement, bringing the overall toll to 20 dead. That represented the greatest loss of life in school violence in Russia since the Beslan terror attack of September 2004, in which 333 people died, many of them children, and 531 were hospitalized.

School shootings are rare in Russia, and none previously have approached the scale of Wednesday’s blood bath. In the only recent case, a lone gunman opened fire in a Moscow high school in 2014, killing a teacher and a police officer.

The victims all died of gunshot wounds, according to the Investigative Committee, which is responsible for investigating all high-profile crimes in the country. The Crimean Health Ministry said that 37 people had been hospitalized.

President Vladimir V. Putin, who called the attack “a tragic event,” held a moment of silence for the victims at an official ceremony he was attending with the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in the resort town of Sochi.

“It is already clear that this was a crime, and the motives and the versions of what happened are being studied carefully,” he said.

Daniil Pyatkov, 17, a student at the school, said people on the campus began to panic as they realized that they were under attack.

He ran to find his girlfriend, who he knew was in the building under assault, he said in an interview on VKontakte, the Russian social media platform.

“The main hall was all covered in smoke, all the glass was broken, there were corpses, injured people everywhere,” he said. “I thought this was a dream.”

The student found his girlfriend at the front of the building, covered in blood and with a broken leg. He said he scooped her up and ran as fast and as far as he could from the building.

Mr. Pyatkov said he saw a picture of the student who reportedly carried out the attack, but it was not someone he had seen before.

Denis Y. Gridchin, the friend of the gunman, said Mr. Roslyakov

also had a dim view of his own prospects, with only technical training. “He did not see a future for himself,” said Mr. Gridchin, also speaking over Vkontakte, and he complained that there was little hope for someone from a small town with no education.

Mr. Roslyakov lived with his mother, who works as a nurse at a Kerch hospital. Local news reports said the mother was treating patients from the shooting, apparently unaware that her son was involved, when investigators came to the hospital to find her.

The director of the college, Olga Grebennikoba, described a scene of carnage in the school’s cafeteria, with the assailant first setting off the explosive device that shattered the windows and then firing indiscriminately at students who crowded the room during the lunch hour.

“There are many corpses, lots of children,” Ms. Grebennikoba told a local television channel. “Children died, staff members died.”

Television pictures from the site of the explosion showed the leafy campus swarming with ambulances and other vehicles to transport the victims to the hospital. One bloodied, mangled victim was transported on the back of an open truck, while another stretcher was shoved onto a small bus.

Kerch, on the eastern end of Crimea, is the landing point for the Kerch Bridge, aa a $7 billion, 12-mile-long link that Mr. Putin inaugurated last May. The construction, opposed by Ukraine, was freighted with symbolism as it provided a physical link to Russia, which annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

The euphoria that accompanied Russia’s annexation has long since faded into resentment, even among the pro-Russian majority. The annexation was always anathema to the indigenous Tatars, who have complained bitterly in recent years of widespread discrimination, including the shuttering of their local legislature and their independent media.

In the process of suppressing the critics, Russia meted out lengthy jail sentences to some arrested on terrorism charges and drove many others to seek refuge in neighboring Ukraine.

Follow Neil MacFarquhar on Twitter: @NeilMacFarquhar.

Ivan Nechepurenko and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting