Day of mourning for Kazan school tragedy
Ilnaz Galyaviev, 19, killed nine people, including seven students. Showing mental disorder, the young man turned himself in to the police. He said he was “born a god, ” but “I didn't realise it right away.” His father, Rinat Nurkhamatovich, wants to know “What did he do? He's a good boy.” For Orthodox Metropolitan John, like in the US, “the minds of young people do not find a strong point of reference.”
Moscow (AsiaNews) – Tatarstan's president has declared a day of mourning today in memory of those killed at Gymnasium No 175 in Kazan, the Republic's capital (picture 1).
Yesterday, 19-year-old Ilnaz Galyaviev (picture 2) opened fire with a shotgun inside the building, killing nine people: four boys, three girls, 26-year-old teacher Elvira Ignatyeva and a high school employee. Another 21 people were hospitalised, six in intensive care.
After shooting at the students, Galyaviev left the school with his hands raised, and was immediately arrested.
He was armed with a Hatsan Escort Aimguard 12 gauge pump-action shotgun, like the one used by the “Kerch shooter”, 18-year-old Vladislav Roslyakov, who in October 2018 killed 21 people, wounding another 67, at the Kerch Polytechnic College on the Crimean coast.
Last April, Galyaviev was expelled from at private university in Kazan, the Academy of Management TISBI, where he was enrolled in the fourth year, for failing to pay tuition fees.
During the initial questioning, Ilnaz Galyaviev stated that he was “born a god”, but “I did not realise it right away”. Last summer “the monster began to awaken in me, and I began to really hate,” the young man said. He was charged him with multiple counts of murder.
The head of the Investigative Committee of Russia (SKR) Alexander Bastrykin arrived immediately in Kazan from Moscow with a group of officers specialised in such cases. The Minister of Health, Mikhail Murashko, and the Minister of Education, Sergey Kravtsov, also came.
Russian President Vladimir Putin summoned the head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov, to shed light on the situation at the Kazan gymnasium, and spoke with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova and Minister of Emergency Situations Civile Yevgeny Zinichev.
Following the tragedy, Putin ordered an urgent review of the country’s gun control laws. Russian schools activated the anti-terrorism protocol.
The president of the Republic of Tatarstan, Rustam Minnikhanov, and several members of the local government visited the scene of the shooting. All emergency agencies sent staff to Gymnasium No 175. All the students were evacuated with some injuring themselves by jumping from windows to escape the gunman.
Rumours about similar incidents in other Kazan schools popped up on the internet, but were quickly denied by the authorities. All educational establishments in Tatarstan’s capital were placed under their control and temporarily closed.
The attacker’s father, Rinat Nurkhamatovich, was in shock. “What did he do? He's a good boy; he's studying in his fourth year of college!” According to him, his son is not religious and until now he had not expressed any kind of destructive thoughts.
The Catholic parish priest of Kazan, Argentine-born Father Diogenes Urquiza, spoke to AsiaNews, expressing his closeness to the victims and their families. For him, this was an “act of madness on the part of an isolated and evidently rather disturbed young man.”
Orthodox Metropolitan John (Roshchin), who is involved in intercultural and interfaith dialogue from Moscow, spoke to us, mentioning his time in the United States.
“In the US, ” he said, “the tragedy of school shootings is very much in the news. Here (in Russia) we feel the problem of the current weaknesses of our society, in which the minds of young people do not find a strong point of reference. In America these events usually happen in spring or autumn, when unstable people are more prone to crises, and it seems that such dynamics are starting to manifest themselves here too.”
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22/07/2021 09:21
