Moscow school shooting: Armed teenager neutralised, students freed

Zee Media Burea/Supriya Jha Moscow: A high-school student armed with a rifle barged into a biology classroom on Monday and killed a police officer and a teacher besides taking 20 students hostage in a school in Moscow. Al the students have been freed and the gunman has now been disarmed and taken to a police car outside school, the police said reportedly. speaking on the state TV, Russian Interior Ministry spokesman Andrei Pilipchuk said, "The person who took 20 people and a teacher hostage is a student in the upper classes at the same school. He has been neutralised and all the students have been freed". He added that the gunman is a student of the same school (School No. 263), but of a higher class. According to a Russian news website, LifeNews, the gunman was an excellent student who staged the shooting to retaliate against a 37-year-old geography teacher Andrew Kirillov, with whom he had an altercation recently.

The disgruntled student entered the school, threatening the guard with a small-caliber rifle and a hunting rifle and said, "I need a geography teacher," the Russian news website reported.  The offender student then entered a biology classroom and held at least twenty teenage students and the teacher hostage for about half an hour. As police reached at the scene, the student opened fire, killing the teacher and a police officer, while another cop was hurt in the process. Unlike in US, school shootings are not a common incident for Russia. Gun ownership is legal in Russia but weapons need to be registered. As the gunman was allowed to enter the school despite the guards, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has called for full review of security systems in city schools. The incident comes just days before Russia is hosting Winter Olympics at Sochi from Feb 7, re-igniting the fears over the security during the games.