8 people brutally murdered in mass shooting in a Russian university

A gunman killed at least eight people at a university in the Russian city of Perm, officials say. The perpetrator was a student who went to campus on Monday morning and started firing.

Students and teachers barricaded themselves in the university building; others were seen jumping out of windows.

Police say they shot and arrested the attacker, who is said to be a student. More than 20 people, including students, were wounded in the shooting.

The incident happened at 11:00 (06:00 GMT) at Perm State University, about 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) east of the capital, Moscow, in the Urals.

A university professor describes students jumping out of buildings: "They went out in some horror, yelling," he told the BBC.

"One of the students told me it was a shot. I heard pops; everyone was running in different directions. I went to my pupils in the second building and kept hearing the bullet shots."

Other students locked themselves in the classrooms to try to escape the shooter.

"There were over 60 people in the class. We shut the door and blocked it with seats," one student, Semyon Karyakin, told Reuters news agency.

The shooter allegedly acted alone and said he had no political or religious motives.

In a post on social media, he also said that he was consumed by hatred and intended to harm others.

"I have been thinking about this for a very long time, it has been years, and I realised that the time has come to do what I dreamed of," he stated on his social media account, which was later taken down, reported the 'Reuters News Agency.

The shooter was identified as a student at the university, according to the commission of inquiry that handles probation and major crimes.

Perm University posted a message on social media asking students who were in the premises to stay in the classrooms. Earlier this year, a 19-year-old gunman fired on his old school in the central Russian city of Kazan, killing nine people.