Russia school shooting: gunman kills 15 in Izhevsk

Man also wounds 24 before killing himself

Russia's Investigative Committee said several children were among those killed in the shooting in Izhevsk. AP

A gunman killed 15 people at a school in the central Russian city of Izhevsk on Monday, the country's interior ministry said.

Russia's Investigative Committee, which handles major crimes, said it was looking into the attacker's suspected neo-Nazi links. It named him as Artem Kazantsev, a man in his early 30s, and said he was a graduate of the school.

“Currently investigators … are conducting a search of his residence and studying the personality of the attacker, his views and surrounding milieu,” the committee said. “Checks are being made into his adherence to neo-fascist views and Nazi ideology.”

The committee said that 15 people, including 11 children, were killed in the shooting, and 24 others, including 22 children, were wounded in the attack. Kazantsev later shot himself.

Regional governor Alexander Brechalov said that the attacker had been registered with a “psycho-neurological” treatment facility. Investigators said Kazantsev was armed with two pistols and a large supply of ammunition.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin “deeply mourns” the deaths and he described the incident as “a terrorist act by a person who apparently belongs to a neo-fascist organisation or group”.

He said doctors, psychologists and neurosurgeons had been sent on Mr Putin's orders to the location of the shooting in Izhevsk, about 970 kilometres east of Moscow.

Investigators released a short video showing the man's body lying in a classroom with overturned furniture and papers strewn on the bloodstained floor. He was dressed all in black, with a red swastika in a circle drawn on his T-shirt.

The school, in the city centre, has 80 teachers and almost 1,000 pupils. It was evacuated immediately after the shooting as emergency services attended the scene, state news agency Tass said earlier.

Three days of mourning have been declared in the Udmurtia region.

In May 2021, a teenage gunman killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan. In September last year, a student armed with a hunting rifle shot six people dead at a university in the city of Perm.

In April 2022, an armed man killed two children and a teacher at a nursery in the central Ulyanovsk region before committing suicide.

In 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people, mostly fellow pupils, in a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.