Two teenage fans of Vladislav Roslyakov, who killed 20 of his classmates in a Columbine-copycat shooting in the Crimean city of Kerch two years ago, were preparing similar school attacks, the Russian security service has revealed.
The suspects, who “were disciples of extremist ideology and followers of Vladislav Roslyakov” wanted to target two schools in Kerch, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement Tuesday.
Police discovered improvised explosive devices (IEDs) with striking elements at their homes as well as spare parts to make more IEDs, which the teens had purchased on the internet. Disturbingly, the two had already been testing their home-made bombs.
Pet animals were used to test the effectiveness of the trial versions of those explosive devices.
One of the arrested youths has been known to the FSB as he had praised the Kerch shooter, thus initiating an inevitable engagement with police. This did not prevent him from joining the same neo-Nazi internet community, of which his idol Roslyakov used to be a member.
The teens thoroughly prepared for their attack, not only making bombs, but also obtaining the layouts of the schools they’d planned to target. They also used to be the admins of so-called online ‘Death Groups,’ in which they tried to persuade others to carry out school massacres, the FBS said.
A classmate of one of the suspects told RT that he’d openly talked about his plans to stage a massacre, saying that he just liked what Roslyakov had done.
“He hates people. He was a pariah at school, after all,” another student said, explaining the possible motives of one of the arrested teens.
In October 2018, Russia was stunned by a brutal massacre at the Kerch Polytechnic College, in which Roslyakov killed 20 people, students and teachers alike, and injured dozens of others.
He first set up an explosive device and then fired indiscriminately with a pump-action shotgun, duplicating the tactics of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who attacked their classmates in Colorado in 1999. Roslyakov was also dressed in black and white like Harris; and, just like him, he committed suicide at the college’s library after the heinous act.