MOSCOW — A 10th-grade student with two rifles burst into his Moscow school Monday, killing his geography teacher and a policeman in front of about 20 students, investigators said. His father played a key role in freeing those students before police stormed the classroom and took his son into custody, the city police chief said.
MOSCOW — A 10th-grade student with two rifles burst into his Moscow school Monday, killing his geography teacher and a policeman in front of about 20 students, investigators said. His father played a key role in freeing those students before police stormed the classroom and took his son into custody, the city police chief said.
The student gunman also seriously wounded a second police officer who responded to an alarm from the school, investigators said.
None of the approximately 400 children in School No. 263 at the time were hurt, said Karina Sabitova, a police spokeswoman. But students were so fearful some ran from the building with their teachers without stopping to put on coats in below-freezing temperatures. The school in northeast Moscow is for children in grades 1-11.
Such shootings in Russian schools are extremely rare. Any attack on a school, however, unavoidably brings back memories of the Beslan school siege in 2004, when Islamic militants from Russia’s North Caucasus took about 1,000 people hostage, most of them children. More than 300 hostages were killed when Russian security forces stormed that school.