A 15-year old student killed a 10-year-old on Tuesday in a knife attack at a school in the Moscow area.
The attacker also stabbed a security guard and a staff member, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee. The attacker pleaded guilty, Olga Vradiy, a representative for the committee was quoted as saying by Russia’s state news agency TASS.
The agency said it suspected a student it identified as Timofey F. and that he was a student at the school, Uspenskaya Comprehensive, in the village of Gorki-2 in Moscow’s Odintsovo region.
Multiple Telegram channels close to the country’s intelligence agencies reported that the attacker came to the school Tuesday wearing a helmet emblazoned with neo-Nazi and other racist slogans. They included a quote from Dylann Roof, who killed nine African American churchgoers in 2015 in South Carolina and intended to incite a race war.
According to Russia’s Internal Affairs Ministry, the student first attacked a security guard who had approached him in the hallway, squirting pepper spray in his face. After that, he stabbed the 10-year-old boy in the neck, it said.
Multiple Telegram channels reported that, before the attack, the suspect sent a manifesto to his classmates that appeared at least partly inspired by the Columbine school attack in the United States in 1999, railing against Muslims, Jews and L.G.B.T. people.
Russia has experienced previous episodes of school violence. In 2018, a knife attack at a school in the Siberian city of Perm left 12 wounded. After a school shooting in Kazan in 2021 that resulted in nine deaths, President Vladimir V. Putin called for restricting civilian gun-ownership rights.
In September 2022, a gunman in Izhevsk killed 15 people and injured 24 in a shooting whose attacker seemed inspired by the Columbine tragedy. Earlier that year, authorities had announced a crackdown on the so-called Columbine movement, which the prosecutor general’s office said had a “widely developed structure” and which it designated a “terrorist organization.”
Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.
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