Girl kills classmate and wounds five others in Russia by shooting

A 14-year-old girl shot dead a classmate and injured five other children on Thursday before killing herself at a school in the western Russian city of Bryansk, officials said.

“According to preliminary investigation data, a 14-year-old girl brought a pump-action shotgun to school, which she used to shoot at her classmates,” Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s equivalent to the FBI, said in a statement.

Investigators were working to determine a motive, the report said.

Bryansk region regional governor Aleksandr V. Bogomaz called the shootings a “terrible tragedy” and said the injured children had suffered mild to moderate injuries.

Weapons are normally tightly controlled in Russia, but Bryansk is one of several regions where cross-border attacks have occurred in the course of the war with Ukraine, and where Moscow has encouraged the formation of self-defense units.

“Together with law enforcement authorities, we are determining the circumstances under which the student was able to obtain a weapon and bring it to school,” Mr. Bogomaz said.

Russia has experienced several school shootings in recent years.

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

In September last year, a gunman wearing a swastika on his T-shirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and injured 24 at a school in Izhevsk where he had once been a student, before dying by suicide, investigators said.