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MOSCOW, Sept 26 (Reuters) – A gunman wearing a swastika on his T-shirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and injured 24 at a school in Russia on Monday before killing himself, investigators said.
The attacker, a man in his 30s named by authorities Artem Kazantsev, killed two security guards and then opened fire on students and teachers at school number 88 in Izhevsk, where he had previously been a student.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, which deals with major crimes, said it was investigating the author’s alleged neo-Nazi ties.
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“Currently, the investigators (…) are conducting a search of his home and studying the personality of the attacker, his opinions and the surrounding environment,” the committee said in a statement. “Verifications are underway on his adherence to neo-fascist views and Nazi ideology.”
Investigators released video showing the man’s body lying in a classroom with overturned furniture and papers strewn across the bloodied floor. He was dressed in all black, with a red swastika in a circle drawn on his T-shirt.
The Board of Inquiry said that of the 24 people injured, all but two were children. Regional Governor Alexander Brechalov said surgeons performed a number of operations.
He said the attacker had been checked into a “psycho-neurological” treatment centre. Investigators said the man was armed with two pistols and a large amount of ammunition.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin “deeply mourns” the dead. He described the incident as “a terrorist act committed by a person who apparently belongs to a neo-fascist organization or group”.
He said doctors, psychologists and neurosurgeons had been sent on Putin’s orders to the scene of the shooting in Izhevsk, about 970 km (600 miles) east of Moscow.
Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years.
In May 2021, a teenager with a gun killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan. In September last year, a student armed with a shotgun shot dead at least six people at a university in the Urals city of Perm.
In April 2022, a gunman killed two children and a teacher at a kindergarten in the central Ulyanovsk region before committing suicide.
In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly classmates, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
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Reuters reporting; written by Mark Trevelyan, edited by Frank Jack Daniel, Angus MacSwan and Nick Macfie
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