On September 20, a young man opened fire at Perm University. The victims were students, employees and a security guard of the university. Who was the shooter supposed to be, and what was his motive?
On September 20 at 10 a.m. Moscow time, a message appeared in the Perm University Telegram group: “If you are currently at the university, if you are in the classroom, please try to close yourself from the inside and stay inside. If you are on campus, leave the campus if possible. If you are going to the university, turn around!”
This morning a young man opened fire on those who were within the walls of the university. As a result of the tragedy, 6 people died, 24 people were injured – but the data is still being updated.
Some students escaped by jumping out of windows on the second floor. Others barricaded themselves in their offices. According to eyewitnesses, there were teachers who, not knowing what was going on, continued to teach. The alarm did not work – the guard who could have pressed the panic button was one of the first to be killed.
However, soon the shooter was wounded, neutralized and detained by a traffic police officer, who, together with his partner, arrived at the scene before anyone else. According to preliminary data, the culprit of the tragedy was 18-year-old Timur Bekmansurov, a 1st year student studying in the specialty “Forensic Science”.
A user with that name had previously published a post on social networks, in which he spoke about the preparations for the shooting at the university and clarified that “what happened is not a terrorist attack.” According to the now-deleted entry, Bekmansurov began planning the attack many years ago, and in the 10th grade he began to save money for the purchase of weapons or a driver’s license – it did not matter to him exactly how he would do it.
The young man described in detail how he passed the test in a psychiatric clinic: he trained in advance to answer correctly using a test found on the Internet, picked up the answers that were expected of him. Although one of the specialists had doubts and sent Bekmansurov for an additional check to his colleague, the young man eventually received a certificate for the purchase of weapons.
Why did he decide to shoot? The post has a detailed answer to this question:
“Ever since elementary school, I realized that I like to hurt people. Their suffering, fear on their faces, I understood these emotions in them, because they were sincere. I had to suppress the desire to destroy everything around me, but I realized that I could not exist like that.
If I didn’t do it now, I would still kill someone in the future. It didn’t matter to me who to kill and in what way. My relatives and friends could not do anything, I could deceive any psychiatrist. The only thing that could stop me was death, since it is close.”
It is noteworthy that despite the recognition of hatred for all people, the “shooter” was still selective in choosing victims. So, he changed his mind about shooting at his school: “The school was too unpleasant a place to spend the last 10 minutes of your life in it, and the kids there don’t have very many escape routes to escape.”
And he singled out among his classmates those whom he decided to “save”: “During the time of communication with classmates, a couple of people seemed to me those who deserve to live. If I meet any of them, I will let you go.”
In addition, Bekmansurov pointed out his strange state: lack of energy, fatigue, constant anger, a feeling of unreality of what is happening, a misunderstanding of other people’s emotions, ringing in the ears and a headache … In connection with which, many suggest that a young person may have mental problems, like this was the case with Ilnaz Galyaviev, who in May 2021 fired at a Kazan school.
Like it or not – experts have yet to find out.