The father of a Russian conscript who allegedly shot and killed eight fellow soldiers on an army base last month has blamed a culture of brutal bullying for driving his son to carry out the attack, raising fresh concerns over a poisonous culture of hazing that Russia claimed to have eliminated from its army.

Ramil Shamsutdinov opened fire from his service weapon last week on a military base in Russia’s Transbaikal region, killing two officers and six soldiers. Some media reports said he targeted the heads of his victims during the rampage.

Defence officials have looked for factors besides hazing that may have caused the incident, saying that Shamsutdinov may have suffered a nervous breakdown unrelated to his service. But his father told Russian journalists on Wednesday that he believed his son had been bullied mercilessly by his fellow soldiers.

“What could have driven him to this?” Shamsutdinov’s father told the Russian outlet RBC. “It’s immediately clear: hazing. Persistent bullying over a long period of time. That drove him to this state.”

The brutal killings last month raised new concerns about the hazing of army conscripts, called “dedovshchina” in Russian, which the Kremlin has sought to root out during its decade-long reform of the army.

The ritualised bullying of new recruits, which can include beatings and psychological torture by officers and older soldiers, has been a suspected cause for hundreds of suicides and thousands of desertions in the Russian army.

Several cases have caused major scandals. One soldier had to have his genitalia amputated in 2006 after being beaten and forced to squat for several hours on New Year’s Day by a likely intoxicated sergeant. Despite a decade-long reform of the army and shortening of the conscription period to one year, reports of brutal hazing and suspicious suicides have continued to plague army units.

Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, earlier this year claimed in an interview that hazing was no longer a systemic problem in the Russian army. He said: “There is simply no place for hazing in the army now”.

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In Shamsutdinov’s case, defence officials have claimed there was no animosity among soldiers on the base in south-eastern Siberia. The head of the Union of Russian Officers, an NGO that regularly takes a pro-Kremlin stance, said the rampage may have been inspired by violent video games.

But regional reports suggest otherwise. The news outlet 72.ru from Shamsutdinov’s native region of Tyumen said that a lieutenant on the base was known to demand money from conscripts, force them to stay awake for days on end, and bullied young soldiers in other ways.

“Clearly he ended up in this type of group,” Shamsutdinov’s brother told RBC. “Maybe over several months he was bullied, persecuted, things were said to him. I myself served, I know how it can happen.”