'Mass murder, not terrorism': 18 people killed in attack on Crimean college

Moscow — Russia's Investigative Committee said on Wednesday that a fatal attack on a college in Crimea was a case of mass murder not terrorism and named 18-year-old student Vladislav Roslyakov as its chief suspect in the rampage.

Roslyakov had gone on a shooting spree in the college before committing suicide, the committee said, and could be seen beforehand on CCTV entering the school with a rifle.

Russia's National Anti-terrorism Committee said that there could have been more than one person behind the attack that killed 18 and injured 50 people, and that a search was underway for other possible participants, RIA news agency reported.

The security body was quoted as saying that an initial examination of the bodies at the site of the attack in the Crimean port city of Kerch showed that casualties had died of gunshot wounds, RIA news agency reported.

It also said that the suspect shot himself and his body had been found inside the college.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that investigators were trying to work out the motive He made the comments at a joint news conference in Moscow with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The attack took place 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.

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.

'Children's bodies everywhere'

"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.