MOSCOW – A Russian teenager was yesterday sentenced to life in jail for killing six people in a shooting spree on a university campus last year, investigators said.
During an attack – one of the worst in recent Russian history – first year law student Timur Bekmansurov roamed through a busy university campus in the Urals city of Perm, some 1,300km east of Moscow, wielding a hunting rifle.
The shooting by the 19-year-old claimed the lives of one man and five women aged between 18 and 66, and injured dozens more before Bekmansurov was arrested.
He was found guilty on multiple counts of murder committed “for motives relating to hooliganism” and sentenced to life in prison, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
During his trial, Bekmansurov fully admitted his guilt and asked the court for a more lenient sentence.
The Perm shooting in September last year was the second such attack that year, after a 19-year-old former student shot dead nine people at his old school in the city of Kazan in May.
Mass shootings at schools and universities in Russia are relatively rare and prompted lawmakers to tighten laws regulating access to guns.
The last major shooting took place in September in the central Russian city of Izhevsk, where a man opened fire in his former school, leaving 18 people dead, most of them children. – AFP, December 29, 2022
