Crimea schoolboy who gunned down 19 was ‘obsessed with Columbine massacre and wanted revenge on evil teachers’
Vladislav Roslyakov, 18, turned up at the college in the city of Kerch and went through the building shooting at fellow pupils before killing himself
THE 18-YEAR-OLD deranged schoolboy who went on a deadly rampage at a school in Crimea was obsessed by the Columbine massacre and wanted to take his revenge out on his teachers, it has been reported.
Vladislav Roslyakov stalked his college halls with a shotgun and let off a homemade bomb packed with metal shards before shooting 19 dead and then killing himself in the school library.
Russian TV interviewed a friend of the killer who said he “hated the technical school very much because of the evil teachers…he hinted that he would take revenge on them”.
Stills from a video camera showed he wore black trousers and a white T-shirt, clothing that resembled the outfit worn by the Columbine high school attacker Eric Harris. The 1999 high school massacre has led to dozens of copycat attacks and plots in the US and abroad.
Terrorism was initially blamed but Russian officials later reclassified the bloodbath as a “mass murder”.
Sergei Aksyonov, the regional leader in Crimea, said the fourth-year student at the school had acted alone.
The committee said all the victims died of gunshot wounds in the 15 minute murder spree.
Officials said an “unidentified explosive device” was detonated at the technical college in Kerch, close to where a new bridge linking Crimea to mainland Russia has been built.
A second bomb found on the killer was later disarmed.
One survivor of the attack said she was lucky to escape with her life.
She told RT: “My friend was killed right in front of me. I saw her fall and simply stop moving. I saw boys dropping dead and blood spilling around.”
Student Semyon Gavrilov said: “I looked outside the classroom and there was a guy with a gun shooting everyone.
“I locked myself in the classroom hoping he wouldn’t hear me. Ten minutes later the police with machine guns arrived.
“Four windows have been blown out in the corridor where the explosion was. There were bodies of the dead on the floor. The walls were charred.”
Anastasia Yenshina, a 15-year-old student at the college, told Reuters: “I came out and there was dust and smoke, I couldn’t understand, I’d been deafened.
“Everyone started running. I did not know what to do. Then they told us to leave the building through the gymnasium.
“Everyone ran there… I saw a girl lying there. There was a child who was being helped to walk because he could not move on his own. The wall was covered in blood. Then everyone started to climb over the fence, and we could still hear explosions. Everyone was scared. People were crying.”
Around 53 people were injured in the killing spree including several with metal pieces embedded in their bodies from the bomb blast.
Twelve of the wounded are in a serious condition.
Sources revealed Roslyakov’s nurse mother Galina was treating wounded ferried from the attack to a local when she learned her son was responsible.
Police arrived to interrogate her and she was said to have left with detectives.
A local source said: “She is confused and cannot explain her son’s motives.”
One pupil, called Sergei, aged 15, said: “I arrived at the hospital, the scene there was awful. They’re bringing in people all covered in blood, some with arms missing, some with legs missing.”
Friends of Roslyakov said he was not very sociable and often put gloomy posts on his social media page.
The director of the school, Olga Grebennikova, described the scene she saw when she entered the college building after the attack.
She said: “There are bodies everywhere, children’s bodies everywhere. It was a real act of terrorism. They burst in five or 10 minutes after I’d left. They blew up everything in the hall, glass was flying.
“They then ran about throwing some kind of explosives around, and then ran around the second floor with guns, opened the office doors, and killed anyone they could find.”
Vladimir Putin described the killing spree at the schoo for 850 teengers as a “tragic event”.
Kerch is the entry point to Crimea from a bridge built between the peninsula and Russia.
What caused the Crimea conflict
- Crimea was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014.
- The annexation was accompanied by a military intervention by Russia.
- Nicknamed the “little green men”, Russian Spetsnaz soldiers in unmarked fatigues helped sepretist rebels establish control in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
- A referendum, which many deemed illegal, was held in the same year.
- As a supposed independent state, Russia now deeemed it legal to accept the region as a Russian state.
- Providing security to the peninsula has been a priority for Moscow.
- The site of the shooting was close to a newly-constructed bridge linking the Black Sea peninsular to mainland Russia.
Crimea was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014 following a disputed vote which was condemned by Western powers.
Some Russian sources accused Ukraine of being behind the attack – despite there being no evidence yet of any such involvement.
Close Putin ally senator Franz Klintsevich, a member of the Russian upper house security and defence committee, said: “I don’t think that the hand of ISIS is able to reach Kerch.
“It is all more like a Ukrainian imprint. It can be…crazy nationalists, who are ready to do anything, in their hate to Russia.”
The speaker of the Russia-backed Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, also suggested Ukraine may have been responsible for the attack.
He said: “The entire evil inflicted on the land of Crimea is coming from the official Ukrainian authorities”.
Russia is notorious for spreading misinformation and propaganda about Ukraine.
After the attack, local officials declared a state of emergency on the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed from Ukraine.
They also beefed up security at a new 11.8-mile bridge linking the peninsula with Russia, which opened earlier this year.
Military units were deployed around the college to help emergency agencies.
Guns are tightly restricted in Russia. Civilians can own only hunting rifles and smoothbore shotguns and must undergo significant background checks.
Roslyakov received a permission to own a shotgun and bought 150 cartridges just a few days ago, according to local officials.
It was the greatest loss of life in school violence in Russia since the Beslan terrorist attack by Chechen separatists in 2004, in which 333 people were killed during a three-day siege, many of them children, and hundreds were wounded.
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