An ordinary school morning after long May holidays turned into a real nightmare for Kazan. At about 9.30 am on May 11, outdoor surveillance cameras captured19-year-old Ilnaz Galyaviev walking towards Kazan school No. 175 with a gun in his hands. He does not hide it, on the contrary, cheerfully waves his barrel to a random passer-by, freely walks into the school grounds, walks to the building and opens fire from the threshold…

“IT WAS VERY SCARY … BUT EVERYONE WAS SILENT”

Explosions and gunfire that followed at the school could be heard in the surrounding houses. Residents filmed videos and posted them on social networks with chilling comments: “We have a school opposite, something exploded…There was such smoke. Now children are jumping out the window. Everyone is running. Lord! Someone is shooting there… ”

The first on the way to the attacker was a 62-year-old building maintenance worker. The man tried to close the glass door in front of the armed and inadequate guy, Galyaviev shot him point-blank through the glass. Hearing the noise, the watchman pressed the panic button. To the sounds of shooting, 26-year-old teacher Elvira Ignatieva came out into the corridor, Galyaviev shot her second, and then entered the unlocked door of one of the classrooms and opened fire on the children …Eighth-grader Albina was in the same office:

“It was the second lesson. Suddenly the headmistress said over the speakerphone that she needed to hide. We heard several explosions and threw ourselves under the desks. It was very scary, but everyone was silent. Then he entered…and began to shoot…”

“He did not aim at someone in particular, but fired indiscriminately! He walked around and repeated that he was a god and would kill everyone… After he had left, we thought the terrible would continue, and someone began to jump into the windows. That guy again entered the classroom and fired a few more shots…Our teacher was covered in blood and crawled on the floor, occasionally moaning … The killer left again…Soon the police came. We were taken out. I know that there are many dead, but I don’t know who exactly.”

Children in the neighboring classes were also shaking with horror at that moment.

“There were two of my friends,” says another girl. “One of them had to jump out the window. She is seriously injured and cannot even speak. We were very lucky that he did not make it to our office…”

According to the students, at least 20 shots and a powerful explosion were heard at the school. According to preliminary information, Galyaviev detonated a homemade bomb in the school corridor.

“When we left, the school was all to smithereens, on the first floor after the explosion, not a single living place was left,” says another student. Children remember everything in a state of shock, automatically, not yet fully realizing what they have experienced. “The second floor is also destroyed, the glass is broken. It felt like they were blowing up and shooting right in our office…”

TEACHER-SAVIOR

Behind the wall from the classroom, in which the shots rang out, the teacher Alina Zaripova reacted quickly — she locked the office from the inside and asked the children to move away from the door and hide.

“Then we heard such a rumble many more times, there was a strange noise and someone was crying,” recalls the ninth-grader Sophia. “We were very scared and could not understand anything.”

“The teacher sat with the children, at the same time covering them, trying to calm them down, and wrote to the parents in the class chat: “Everything is fine, the children are here, and everything is calm in our class,” while at the same time, in the same office from which the shots were fired, was her son…

“We were sitting on the floor behind the back desks, heard an explosion and shooting, the teacher was with us until the rescuers and head teachers knocked on the door and said that we could go out. When everything was over and we were already taken out of the building, she started looking for her son,” recalls Daniyar (the child’s name has been changed. – Ed.). “We saw how she called, cried, looked for her son, but could not find him.”

“Parents wrote, we answered,” says Sophia. “We turned off the sound, but they already understood that there was no need to call, to attract attention. After a while, rescuers started knocking on the doors …When they took us out, we saw windows, the remains of doors on the floor and realized that something very terrible had definitely happened. It was only then that we realized that we were separated by only one wall from the place where our friends had died. We realized that that guy with a weapon could also get to us…It turns out, instead of saving her son, the teacher saved us…”

At the moment, it is known about seven dead children and two teachers. Another 21 people (18 of them are children) were injured.

MINIMIZED YOUR HOUSE

The security forces arrived at the school very quickly. Then the parents, frightened to death, began to come running. Soon a crowd formed, which tore through the cordon, trying to find out what happened to their children…

Moms and dads rushed not only to the 175th gymnasium, as messages immediately rained down on social networks and messengers: “They shoot in other schools as well.” The Ministry of Internal Affairs quickly denied this information, and then dotted the “i” s about the fact that Galyaviev allegedly had a 41-year-old accomplice. Again, information flew on social networks that he took the children hostage and barricaded himself in the classroom on the fourth floor…

But Galyaviev was alone. After the mass execution, he tried to escape through the window, but was caught by the officers of the patrol and guard service… And then the emergency services had to rush home to the attacker — the guy shouted that he had mined his apartment. All residents of the house on Tuganlyk Street were evacuated, sappers checked every corner on all floors, but they did not find any explosive devices.

“We were walking when we heard this rumble. Then blood-stained children ran past. I don’t remember the guy himself, but I often met his mother. They looked normal, even intelligent,” told a neighbor of the Galyaviev family, Inessa.

According to other neighbors, Ilnaz was a very quiet and calm guy, he lived with his mother and brother, brought his friends home, but did not arrange any fights.

“I knew Ilnaz since kindergarten; he was a normal sociable boy,” a childhood friend of the killer told. “After kindergarten we went to one school. There he, too, was not particularly different somewhere. In conflicts, I did not notice him. I communicated well with the teachers. His parents are kind and sympathetic… Problems in the family? We did not notice anything like that.”

“THE WORLD SHOULD NOT REMAIN ALIVE”

But it is in such outwardly prosperous families that monsters most often grow up under the guise of quiet and non-conflict children…

It has already been established that the attack on the school was not spontaneous. “Quiet” Ilnaz Galyaviev has been preparing a terrorist attack in cold blood since at least February. It was in this month that he began ringing up gun shops for the purchase of “a not very expensive, but trouble-free rechargeable hunting rifle so that you could overwhelm a wild boar or a bear,” began collecting certificates and draw up documents for the purchase…He received permission at the end of April, after which he immediately bought a pump and a decent ammunition. No questions…

A few days before the tragedy, he started his own channel in Telegram, calling it ‘God.’ There, the guy stated that all people are “biomass,” called for murder and openly informed his few subscribers (before the mass execution of children there were eight of them, then the channel was removed) that he was going to kill a large number of people, and then commit suicide.

“There should be no living creatures in the world. This is a mistake of the Universe,” Galyaviev wrote.

Four years ago, Ilnaz was a student of that very 175th school. After the ninth grade, he entered the college at the University of Management ‘TISBI.’ He studied to be an IT specialist, but in April 2021 he was expelled, because he had not appeared in class since January. Family acquaintances say that after that he had a serious quarrel with his father. But everyone talks about it as a subtle dullness.

“A quiet mouse, who sat perfectly calmly for three years, polite, tidy, did not make friends with anyone, was all in the computer,” says Nella Pruss, Rector of the TISBI University of Management, about a former student. “Absolutely calm, in general was not noticed in anything. How could this be determined?”

The personality described by neighbors, teachers and former classmates does not fit in any way with the one that appeared during interrogation in front of the operatives. Galyaviev, handcuffed, literally howled like a beast in his cell. If you cleanse obscene language from his monologue, the meaning will come out like this:

“I was born a god! I just didn’t realize it right away, about two months ago. And in the summer, a monster began to awaken in me. I started to hate everyone. I always hated everyone, and now I hate everyone even more. I have no mother; she is not my mother. I have no parents at all. I hate you all! I have never called them either Mom or Dad, and they know it very well!”

P.S. By the decision of President of the Republic, Rustam Minnikhanov, all families of injured and dead schoolchildren will be provided with the necessary material assistance. The families of the victims will receive 1 million rubles each, 400,000 — people who have received severe and moderate injuries, 200,000 — light injuries.

After the shooting at the school, May 12 was declared a day of mourning in Tatarstan.