Image copyright Reuters Image caption Emergency services rushed to the school to deal with the fight

Eleven children and a teacher were wounded in Russia when a knife fight broke out at a school in Perm, a city 1,000km (620 miles) east of Moscow.

The victims were slashed when they tried to tackle two teenage boys who burst into a classroom wielding knives.

Two suspects, both 16, were detained by police and the incident is being treated as attempted murder.

Surgeons operated on 47-year-old teacher Natalya Shagunina and on four of the children, RIA Novosti news said.

The teacher remains critically ill, the others' injuries are less severe.

Most of the injured children are aged 10-12 and have knife cuts to the head and neck.

The school was evacuated and will remain shut on Tuesday as police pursue a criminal investigation there.

Image copyright EPA Image caption Classes were abandoned because of the emergency at the school

Conflicting reports

Some witnesses quoted on social media contradicted reports from local security officials about what happened.

The witnesses said the two boys with knives had attacked the teacher and slashed pupils who rushed to defend her.

One, quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, said the two boys were clad in black, armed with hunting knives and acted together.

Earlier, a security source quoted by Interfax news agency said two boys had started a knife fight in a corridor, then burst into a classroom where younger children were studying.

Interfax quoted another local source as saying one of the boys had been expelled from the school, because of drugs and mental health issues, but got in after telling a guard outside that he was a pupil.

There are reports that one assailant, or both, had been angered by personal comments on social media.

Children said they saw blood on the floor as they were led out.</s>The two teenage boys were armed with knives when they entered the fourth-grade classroom in Russia's Urals city of Perm on January 15. Witness accounts suggest that a premeditated attack ensued, leaving one teacher and nine young students hospitalized with knife wounds.

Russian authorities, however, are painting a different picture of an incident that is drawing comparisons to the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado that left a total of 15 people dead.

Regional police have both issued statements saying that the violence erupted after an argument broke out between the two knife-wielding teenage boys, one of whom was reportedly a current student at Perm's School No. 127.

The regional branch of the powerful federal Investigative Committee said in a January 15 statement that the teacher, 46-year-old Natalya Shagulina, and several students were injured after they "tried to stop" the fight between the two suspects.

Russian state media has largely taken its cue from these official statements, characterizing the incident as a "fight" that spun out of control. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, urged the media not to jump to conclusions.

"This is a knife fight between students at a school. It is not an outside attack on a school. Let's wait for the opinions of experts," Peskov was quoted as saying January 15.

But witness accounts given to RFE/RL and other media outlets suggests that the two suspected assailants -- reportedly both 16 years old -- were acting in coordination.

The grandmother of a fourth-grader injured in the incident told RFE/RL's Russian Service that the teacher was the first to be attacked, and that the assailants began stabbing anyone who came near them in the ensuing panic. One of the attackers was standing near the door, she said, citing her granddaughter's account.

"They placed my granddaughter face down on the desk and stabbed her twice in the neck with a knife," the grandmother said on condition of anonymity. "Some of the kids made it to the exit, including my little girl."

While federal state TV networks characterized the incident as the result of an altercation between the two assailants, other Russian state media cited witness accounts contradicting this portrayal.

"There was no fight between the two older students. And the teacher didn't try to separate them," Russia's state-backed international news network, RT, quoted a woman identified as a mother of one of the fourth graders in the classroom as saying.

"These two guys in black masks came in, and then almost silently removed the knives from their sheaths and started slashing the teacher's neck. This is what my daughter told me," RT cited the woman, identified as Inessa Titova, as saying.

Precisely how the suspects sustained their injuries remains unclear.

At least one of the suspected assailants was linked in media reports to a social-media group related to the Columbine massacre, in which two students killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives.

The office of the Kremlin's top official for children's rights, Anna Kuznetsova, said in a January 16 statement that one of the suspects had a record of violent behavior toward fellow students as early as 2012. It added that the boy's parents had asked regional social services for help last year, but that instead the parents themselves had been fined.

"This tragedy might not have happened," Kuznetsova was quoted as saying, citing what she called the "unprofessionalism of experts" and a "lack of communication and consistency in the work of state agencies."

Kuznetsova a day earlier had criticized what she called insufficient security measures at the school. "Can it be that there was no one other than 10-year-old children to stop the hooligans," she wrote on Facebook.

Citing unidentified sources, the Kommersant newspaper reported on January 16 that investigators had questioned the two suspected attackers earlier in the day.

The attack at the Perm school comes in the wake of a September 5 attack by a 15-year-old student in a suburb of Moscow. The schoolboy attacked his teacher with a meat cleaver and shot her in the face with an air gun.

Anton Orekh, a political commentator for the liberal-minded Russian radio broadcaster Ekho Moskvy, said violent incidents like those as the Perm school force Russia to "take a long, hard look at an array of problems" and criticized federal television channels for giving insufficient coverage

"You can give any diagnosis and play up the problem any way you want. But you can't pretend that nothing serious happened," Orekh wrote.

Sergei Smirnov, editor in chief of the Russian news portal MediaZona -- which focuses on the country's criminal-justice system -- told RFE/RL that authorities' portrayal of the incident as the result of a fight between the suspected assailants appears "strange."

"Based on what we know, it was a premeditated attack," Smirnov said. "But a fight is a convenient explanation. No one in the local authorities wants to take responsibility and make any bombshell statements."</s>Russian authorities say a teacher and two teenage boys have been seriously injured in what investigators say was a knife fight at a high school in the city of Perm.

The regional Security Ministry said that a total of 15 people, most of them students, were hurt in the incident at School No. 127 on January 15.

Initial reports cited officials as saying two masked men attacked the school in the city, which is 1,150 kilometers northeast of Moscow.

But the regional Investigative Committee branch later said that it was a fight between two students with knives and that teachers and other students tried to break it up.

Police, meanwhile, said that one of the boys involved in the fight was a former student at the school.

In a statement, the regional police said that an unspecified number of suspects were detained and that one had previously been on a register of people diagnosed as having mental-health problems.

The Security Ministry said that a female teacher and two boys, aged 15-16, suffered severe injuries.

Classes were canceled and the school was evacuated.

The Investigative Committee has opened an investigation on suspicion of attempted murder.

There were conflicting reports about whether anyone was in custody.

With reporting by Current Time TV, RFE/RL's Russian Service, RIA Novosti, Interfax, Meduza, and Mediazona</s>The number of those injured in the knife fight in a school in the Russian city of Perm has risen to 12, including 11 children, the regional police said.

"Two minors, one of whom is a student, the second is a former student of the school, had a conflict with the use of knives. Eleven minors and one teacher received cut wounds," the police said, adding that one of the fight participants had been registered in a psychoneurological clinic.

The teacher and one of the students who was injured by the two unknown attackers at the Perm school are in serious condition and undergoing surgery, the regional Health Ministry has stated.

"Two criminals in masks attacked a teacher and students. As a result of an armed attack, nine people received knife wounds, one teacher and eight students," the press secretary said.

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“Early on January 15 in one of the schools of the Motovilikhinsky District of Perm a knife fight broke out. The faculty and students present at the scene attempted to break up the fight. As a result, (several) students and a teacher sustained knife wounds,” a press release issued by the authorities said.

The suspects were brought into custody and the authorities are currently trying to determine their motives.

A source in regional emergencies services also told Sputnik that at least "nine children and one teacher were injured" during the altercation while local police said in a press release that "eleven minors and one teacher sustained slashing wounds."</s>A teacher and 11 children were hospitalized Monday during a knife fight at a school in Russia, authorities said.

A further nine students were treated by paramedics at the scene in the city of Perm, officials said. The ages of the victims and their conditions were not immediately known.

An attempted murder investigation was launched into the incident, which began as a fight between two teenagers, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation’s Perm division said in a statement.

The injuries occurred as students and teachers tried to subdue the perpetrators, it said, adding that both had been detained.

One of the suspects was a former student while another attended the school, local news site 59.ru reported, citing local police sources. One of them was undergoing psychiatric treatment and was known to authorities, it added.

Police and ambulances were called at 10:20 am local time Monday (00:20 a.m. ET) to School No. 127 in the Motovilikhinsky area of the city, which lies near the Ural Mountains about 850 miles to the east of Moscow.</s>MOSCOW -- At least 15 people were injured during a knife attack at a school in the Ural mountains city of Perm, Russian authorities said Monday. The local Investigative Committee said teachers and other students were injured when they tried to break up a fight between two students.

A female teacher and two students around 15 years old were seriously wounded and required surgery, the regional health ministry said. Nine children received what the department calls "superficial injuries."

Of the 15 who were hurt, 12 were hospitalized, the city health department said. Investigators said they are treating the incident as attempted murder of two or more people.

Investigators said the two suspects have been detained, the Reuters news agency reports. Nearly 700 students attend the school.

According to Reuters, media reports initially stated that two masked men burst into the school and attacked students, but authorities later said the began as a fight between the two students.</s>Eleven children and a teacher were wounded in Russia when a knife fight broke out at a school in Perm, a city 1,000km (620 miles) east of Moscow.

The victims were slashed when they tried to separate two teenage boys who were fighting, investigators say.

Two suspects were detained by police and the incident is being treated as attempted murder. One boy was angry about social media posts, reports say.

The teacher and a 16-year-old are in hospital with serious neck wounds.

Some of the other injured children are believed to be aged 10. Their injuries are reported to be fairly minor.

One suspect is reportedly a former pupil of the school who previously had psychiatric treatment.

The school was evacuated and children said they had seen a trail of blood on the floor as they were led out.

A video from the scene shows one of the suspects being taken from the school by police, head down and in handcuffs.</s>At least 15 people at a Russian school were wounded Monday during a vicious knife fight, according to state-run media.

A dozen of the victims were hospitalized, including fourth-grade students, the TASS news agency reported Monday.

The scuffle went down at School No. 127 in Perm, a Siberian city nearly 900 miles east of Moscow, between a student and a teen who previously attended the school, TASS reported.

Students and teachers tried to break up the fight, which only escalated from there, per a statement from the local Investigation Committee of the Russian Federation.

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A female teacher was wounded, brought to a nearby hospital where she underwent surgery, according to TASS.

The fighting teens — ages 15 and 16 — also required surgery and were put in intensive car with injuries to their jugular veins and carotid arteries.

A source told the news agency the former student was tossed from the school over mental and drug problems.

A representative for the local investigation committee was quoted in TASS saying the fight may have carried into a fourth-grade classroom.</s>At least 14 students and a teacher were injured in a knife rampage at a school in the Russian city of Perm. The teenagers who started the assault may have been inspired by the Columbine High School massacre, according to reports.It all started Monday morning when a knife fight broke out between an 11th grader and a former student "on the grounds of personal enmity," local investigators told RT. The brawl then spilled into a classroom of fourth grade students. The teacher and children tried to separate the two, sustaining injuries as a result.This echoes an initial report by the mayor's office, which said the school had been attacked by masked assailants.Pictures of the school floor, covered with blood, were circulating on social media while witnesses spoke of seeing bloodstained children running out of the school in all directions."The children were in shock," recalled one an employee at a nearby shopping mall where frightened students sought refuge.Twelve of those injured were taken to hospital as a result of the knife rampage. The teacher and two teenagers are in a serious condition, while others received minor injuries, medics said.The boys who came to school with knives and went on stabbing spree are 16 and 17 years old. One of them has been registered with a psycho-neurological facility, regional police said.Telegram-channel Mash reported that a boy, whom it identified as Lev Bidjakov, and his friend Aleksandr decided toLev and his friend were reportedly inspired by the Columbine High School Massacre in the US, which occurred in April 1999, when two senior students began shooting fellow students outside the school in Littleton, Colorado, before moving inside to continue their rampage.According to media reports, the initiator of the Perm school knife rampage posted Columbine attack videos on Russian social media network VKontakte (In Contact). He also reportedly subscribed to pages devoted to the massacre.</s>MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian investigators opened a criminal case into a knife attack at a school in the city of Perm on Monday which left 15 people injured, three of whom the authorities said were in a serious condition in hospital.

Media reports initially said two masked men armed with knives had burst into the school and attacked pupils, but authorities in Perm, about 700 miles north-east of Moscow, said the attack grew out of a knife fight between two pupils.

Local security authorities said in a statement that other pupils and a female teacher had tried to break up the fight.

They said twelve people had been taken to a local children’s hospital and a further three, including the teacher and two pupils aged 15-16, were in a serious condition at a different hospital.

Investigators said they had detained the suspects. The school, where almost 700 children studied, had been evacuated, the authorities said.
A knife fight between students breaks out in a school in Perm, Russia. Twelve injured are reported, with three of them in serious condition.