KEY POINTS

  • The unidentified suspect was taken into custody 
  • He suffered injuries while resisting law enforcement officers
  • The motive behind the shooting was not known 

A student opened fire on a university campus in the Russian city of Perm on Monday, killing at least eight people and injuring several others.

The unidentified suspect reportedly entered the Perm State University campus "with an offensive weapon" and opened fire. He was taken into custody and suffered injuries while resisting law enforcement officers, CNN reported. The motive behind the shooting was not known.

Meanwhile, some students and teachers locked themselves in their classrooms during the attack. A video of the incident is going viral on social media and it showed students jumping out of the windows of a building to save themselves.

Speaking to BBC, one of the university's professors, Ivan Pechishchev, said he saw some students jumping out of the second floor as he went to class.

"They jumped out in some horror, screaming. One of the students told me that it was a shooting. I heard pops, everyone began to scatter in different directions. I went to my students in the second building and continued to hear the pops," he told the outlet.

The professor added that there are about 10 buildings on the university campus, all of which were immediately blocked by the security.

Speaking to Reuters, a student said, "There were about 60 people in the classroom. We closed the door and barricaded it with chairs."

Some local reports say that prior to the attack, the gunman had allegedly written on social media that he was acting alone and had no political or religious motives.

The number of injured was not certain – reports varied from six to 19. It also remained unclear if any of the students suffered injuries from jumping from the building.

Perm is about 700 miles east of Russia's capital Moscow and has a population of about 1 million. Perm State University enrolls some 12,000 students every year.

This is the second such incident in less than five months. In May, seven children and two adults were killed after a 19-year-old open fire at a school in the Russian city of Kazan. Twenty-one other people, mostly children, were injured in the shooting.

Mass casualty shootings are rare in Britain, where most police officers are unarmed
Police Line | Representative Image AFP / Niklas HALLE'N