An armed student has briefly taken 20 teenagers hostage in a Moscow school, killing a policeman and a teacher before being detained amid security jitters ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.
Witnesses said the suspect - described as a 'straight-A' pupil named Sergei Gordeyev - charged into the school on Monday wielding two rifles and ordered a security guard to lead him to a specific classroom in the two-story building on the northern outskirts of Moscow.
The hostage-taker bolted himself inside with about 20 teenaged pupils and the class teacher.
He then opened fire through a window at scores of police who had rushed to the scene. Security officials said the student made no demands during the broad daylight attack.
"He killed a policeman and wounded another," Russian interior ministry spokesman Andrei Pilipchuk told the state-run Vesti-24 news channel.
"He also killed the teacher."
The Russian interior ministry said the hostage-taker had been detained during a police raid on the school and that all the students were now safe and unharmed.
"None of the students has been harmed," Pilipchuk told Vesti 24. "They are all alive and well."
Live footage showed a group of children running from the white-and-pink building and an emergencies ministry police helicopter hovering above the snow-covered school yard.
Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and Russia's powerful Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin both immediately rushed to the scene of a crisis that underscored the security problems facing Russia as it prepares to host the Winter Games in Sochi on Friday.
Security has been a prime concern for President Vladimir Putin - his personal and political prestige linked closely to the success of the Games - because Sochi is located near the volatile North Caucasus region where Russia has been battling an Islamic insurgency for most of the past two decades.
Islamists who want to carve out their own state in southern Russia have vowed to stage deadly attacks during the Games that would undermine Putin and show that he lacks control over the vast country.
Russia has been on heightened alert ever since successive-day late December suicide bombings in the southern city of Volgograd killed 34 people at a railway station and on a trolleybus.
Security analysts believe that Sochi itself will be relatively safe both for athletes and visitors because of the extraordinary security precautions that have been taken at the Black Sea resort port.
