A 14-year-old girl shot and killed a schoolmate and wounded 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, from which she fired shots at her classmates,” Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s equivalent to the F.B.I., said in a statement.
Investigators were working to establish the motive, it said.
The regional governor of the Bryansk region, Aleksandr V. Bogomaz, called the shootings a “terrible tragedy” and said the wounded children had sustained mild or moderate injuries.
Guns are normally tightly controlled in Russia, but Bryansk is one of several regions that have seen cross-border attacks in the course of the war with Ukraine, and where Moscow has encouraged the formation of self-defense units.
“Together with law enforcement agencies, we are determining the circumstances under which the student was able to obtain and bring a weapon to school,” Mr. Bogomaz said.
Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years.
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.
In September last year, a gunman with a swastika on his T-shirt killed 15 people, including 11 children, and wounded 24 at a school in Izhevsk where he had once been a pupil, and then died by suicide, investigators said.
