A Russian teenager on Thursday shot dead a classmate and injured five others before killing herself in a school in Bryansk near the Ukrainian border, investigators said.

School shootings are relatively rare in Russia, which has strict gun laws, but have become more common in recent years.

“A 14-year-old girl brought a pump-action shotgun to school, which she used to shoot her classmates. As a result, two died — one of them the shooter — and there are five wounded,” the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Authorities did not name the shooter, but said the victim was a female classmate in the secondary school in the Bryansk suburb.

“The motives behind the crime and all the circumstances are being established,” the Instigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said.

The five wounded had been taken to medical facilities, it said.

The shooting took place at Gymnasium Number Five outside the centre of Bryansk, a city near Ukraine that has been subjected to occasional shelling and drone attacks.

In western Russian city of Izhevsk in September last year, a gunman killed 18 people at a school.

In 2021, a 19-year-old shooter killed nine people in a school in Kazan, in Tatarstan. That same year, a teenager killed six people at a university in the Urals city of Perm. (AFP excluding headline)