A Russian teenager who attacked a teacher with a meat cleaver and fired an air gun into her face during an assault in September 2017 has been sentenced to seven years and three months in prison.
A court in the northeastern Moscow suburb of Ivanteyevka convicted the boy, who has not been identified because of his age, and pronounced the sentence on February 15.
The defendant was 15 years old when he attacked the teacher on September 5, 2017.
Three children who jumped from school windows during the incident were hospitalized -- one with a broken bone and others with lesser injuries.
The sentencing comes less than two months after a court in the city of Perm, 1,150 kilometers northeast of Moscow, sentenced a 17-year-old boy to nine years and eight months in prison after convicting him of a knife attack at his former school that left 12 people hospitalized.
On December 18, the Perm court found the teenager guilty on 30 charges of attempted murder and of damaging school property.
School attacks have been rare in Russia and other former Soviet republics, but in recent months there have been several such incidents in Russia, as well as a gun-and-bomb attack on a college in the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Authorities say an 18-year-old killed 20 people in that incident in October before fatally shooting himself.
In neighboring Belarus, a teenager was arrested after he stabbed a teacher and a student to death and wounded two classmates.
On December 6, a Moscow secondary school was evacuated after a 16-year-old student brought a knife into the building and threatened to kill himself, officials said.
On November 12, authorities said a 14-year-old boy in the Volgograd region brought an axe, several knives, and a gas canister to his school. He was hospitalized for a day after he swallowed rat poison. Nobody else was hurt.
On December 4, the Russian parliament's lower house passed a bill banning "online Columbine communities" that lawmakers say encourage violence among schoolchildren.
Columbine is a high school in the western U.S. state of Colorado where two students staged an attack in 1999, killing 12 fellow students and a teacher before fatally shooting themselves.
