He was a fourth-year student at the college in the city in Crimea - the southern peninsula annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014. State television has broadcast shocking images of the rampage, much of it recorded by teenage college students trying to flee the suspected lone gunman, named as 18-year old Vladislav Roslyakov, as he stalked the corridors shooting classmates. Authorities said they were investigating if he had an accomplice in Wednesday's shotgun massacre at Kerch Polytechnic College. Russia's RBC TV interviewed a friend who said Roslyakov "hated the technical school very much" and had vowed "revenge" on his teachers. A computer taken from the home where Roslyakov lived with his parents revealed little, a Crimean official said Thursday. "When they did a search and saw the computer, all information, messages and such had been deleted," Crimean human rights ombudswoman Lyudmila Lubina was quoted as saying by Russian news agency Tass. "He was acting on his own here, we know that. The Kerch attack was by far the deadliest carried out by a student in Russia, raising questions about school security. Wednesday's violence also was the deadliest school attack in Russia since the 2004 Beslan attack by Chechen separatists, which left 333 people dead, many of them children, during a three-day siege. As the day wore on Thursday, neither Russian investigators nor other authorities followed up on Aksyonov's comments hinting at a wider attack plot. Dozens of people remained hospitalized in Kerch, and at least 10 with severe injuries were being airlifted to top Russian hospitals for surgery, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said. Investigators later said they had found a second explosive device among the gunman's possessions and that it had been disarmed. "Some victims' internal organs were ruptured, we're finding washers and ballbearings in their livers, intestines, blood vessels," she said. The TV report described a scene of devastation and mass panic after the blast. She said she last saw him a week ago when he stopped by and asked if he could take all the family photo albums.
– After Wednesday's massacre at a vocational school in Crimea, Russians are looking for answers—and some of them are looking toward the West. Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the gun and bomb attack carried out by a student in Kerch "appears to be a result of globalization," the BBC reports. "On social media, on the Internet, we see the creation of entire communities," he said. "Everything started with the tragic events in schools in the US." State-funded broadcaster RT has described the attack as having a "shocking resemblance" to the 1999 Columbine mass shooting, with the attackers in both cases setting off explosives in cafeterias, shooting fellow students, and killing themselves in school libraries. Political analyst Sergey Mikheyev blamed the attack on "Western subculture," CNN reports, which "builds its matrix on the cult of violence," he said on state television. "The one who has a weapon in his hands is right. This is a purely American approach to the matter." The death toll in the Kerch attack reached 20—15 students and five teachers—after one of the injured died Thursday, the AP reports. Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova says most victims died from gunshot wounds, but the shrapnel-packed explosive device caused many horrific injuries, with some victims losing their legs or feet. Few details have been released on attacker Vladislav Roslyakov, an 18-year-old student at the school. (Putin said Thursday that Russians killed in a nuclear strike will "go to heaven" as martyrs.)