Four injured after student in Russia attacks peers, teacher with hammer

MOSCOW (AFP): A teenage student wounded four people with a hammer on Monday at a school in the southern Russian city of Chelyabinsk, near the border with Kazakhstan, local authorities said. The 13-year-old boy attacked teachers and fellow students before he was stopped, province governor Aleksey Teksler wrote on X. Two 13-year-old girls, one boy and a teacher were injured and admitted to hospital, the local health ministry said.

The suspect was also carrying a knife and a gun, according to a police source cited by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti. His motives were not immediately clear. “How could a student get into the school with a hammer and why didn’t security guards respond?” Teksler asked on X.



He said he had ordered security protocols to be reviewed at every school in the region. A probe has been launched into “planned murder” and “neglect”, said the Investigative Committee of Russia, which is responsible for the country’s biggest investigations. The attack took place at school number 68 in Chelyabinsk, Teksler said.

Armed school attacks in Russia, once a rarity, have risen in recent years. President Vladimir Putin has called them an import from the United States and blamed globalization. He has tightened gun ownership law.

A 14-year-old girl opened fire at a school in the southwestern city of Bryansk in December 2023, killing a classmate before taking her own life. A separate shooting in Ijevsk in central Russia in September 2022 left 18 dead. Nine people were killed by a 21-year-old attacker at a school in Kazan in the Russian republic of Tatarstan in 2021.

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