A court in the city of Khabarovsk, on February 20, found 19-year-old local resident Aleksandr Onufriyenko guilty of plotting a terrorist act, illegal firearms possession, incitement to extremism and terrorism, and undergoing training to commit a terrorist act.
The court concluded that Onufriyenko planned to conduct a shooting spree on February 22, 2019, at School No. 30 in Khabarovsk, where he used to study and where his mother works as a teacher of Russian language and literature.
Investigators said that police found leaflets of the banned Russian National Unity organization, a sawed-off shotgun, and 95 shotgun shells in Onufriyenko’s possession, which they say he planned to use for the shooting spree in the school.
Onufriyenko pleaded guilty.
There have been several attacks in recent years in schools in Russia, the latest one in a college in the Far Eastern city of Blagoveshchensk in November that claimed one student’s life. The shooter later shot himself to death.
In October 2018, an 18-year-old student killed 20 people in a gun-and-bomb attack in a college in Russia-controlled Crimea before fatally shooting himself.
In April 2019, a court in the Urals city of Perm sentenced a 17-year-old teenager to seven years in prison after finding him guilty of a knife attack in January 2018 at his school that left 12 people hospitalized.
Also in January 2018, a ninth-grader attacked fellow students with an ax and other weapons in the Siberian region of Buryatia.
In 2017, a teenager in the Russian region of Bashkortostan entered his school and stabbed a female student and a teacher before setting a classroom on fire. Another girl sustained serious injuries when she fled by jumping from a second-story window.