Moscow - Eighteen people were killed and
dozens injured at a college in the Black Sea region of Crimea on
Wednesday when at least one attacker set off a bomb in the
cafeteria and went through the building shooting at random,
officials said.
Law enforcement officials said they were treating the
incident, in which many of the victims were teenage pupils, as a
terrorist attack.
Sergei Aksyonov, the head of the Russian-backed
administration in Crimea, a region Moscow annexed from Ukraine
four years ago, said the main suspect was a male student a the
college and that he had killed himself.
Video footage from the scene showed armoured personnel
carriers and military trucks lined up on the approach to the
college, in the Crimean city of Kerch. Russia's Defence Minister
Sergei Shoigu said the military was sending forces and supplies
to help the victims.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, prompting
international condemnation and Western sanctions. Since the
operation to annex the peninsula, there have been no outbreaks
of violence there.
Aksyonov, the regional head, told Russian state television
the death toll from the attack now stood at 18, up from a
previous estimate of 13.
Olga Grebennikova, the college's director, described a scene
of bloodshed at the college, which provides vocational training.
Its pupils are mostly teenagers.
"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," Grebennikova told Crimean media outlets.
"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."
The Investigative Committee, the law enforcement body that
investigates major crimes, said initial information was that an
explosive device packed with metal objects had gone off in the
cafeteria of the college.
It said in a statement that there were around 50 people
wounded in the attack.
Russian news agencies quoted a senior official with Russia's
National Guard, a law enforcement agency, as saying that the
attack was being treated as terrorism. There was no immediate
claim of responsibility.
An employee at a hospital in Kerch was quoted as saying that
18 people had already been admitted with injuries from the
explosion, and that doctors were expecting around 50 more
wounded people to be brought in.
"There are already lots of people in the emergency room, and
in the operating theatre," the TASS news agency quoted the
employee as saying.
Anastasia Yenshina, a 15-year-old student at the college,
said she was in a toilet on the ground floor of the building
with some friends when she heard the sound of an explosion.
"I came out and there was dust and smoke, I couldn't
understand, I'd been deafened," she told Reuters. "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."
Photographs from the scene of the blast posted by local
media outlet Kerch.FM showed that the ground floor windows of
the two-storey building had been blown out, and that debris was
lying on the floor outside.
Emergency services teams could be seen in the photographs
carrying wounded people from the building on makeshift
stretchers and loading them on to buses and ambulances.