Prisoners in Russia shot by snipers after killing 4 guards, pledging fealty to ISIS
Group of 4 inmates takes 12 hostages, fatally stabs guards before eventually being ‘neutralized’ by Russian forces
MOSCOW — Snipers from Russia’s National Guard on Friday killed four inmates who had stabbed four prison guards to death and briefly held others as hostages while declaring allegiance to the Islamic State group.
The Federal Prison Service said that four inmates took eight prison guards and four inmates hostage. It said they stabbed four of the guards, three of whom died on the spot and the fourth one later died at a hospital. The agency said three other guards were hospitalized with injuries.
Russia’s National Guard said its snipers “neutralized” all four attackers, freeing all the hostages, while the Federal Prison Service also claimed credit for killing the assailants.
The discrepancy could not be immediately explained. Details of the violence at the prison in Surovkino in the Volgograd region, 860 kilometers southeast of Moscow, were sparse and it was not clear how the inmates had taken hostages several hours earlier.
Videos that purportedly came from the scene and circulated on Russian media and messaging app channels showed men wielding knives inside and in a prison yard and several men in what appeared to be guard uniforms lying in blood on the ground.
In the videos, the alleged attackers claimed support for the Islamic State group and for the suspects arrested in the March terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall that left 145 people dead. An ISIS affiliate claimed responsibility for that attack, in which gunmen killed patrons waiting for a popular music group to perform and set the building on fire.
????????????#BREAKINGNEWS: #RUSSIAN FORCES SWIFTLY END #ISIS' SEIZURE OF #VELGOGRAD PRISON! in a half-hour operation, during which, one of the terrorists shot dead trying to detonate malfunctioning suicide vest, other 3 neutralized with sniper fire but was taken into custody alive, all… https://t.co/IRsyZSFJ9Y
— Final Causer (@finalcauseer) August 23, 2024
The state news agency Tass said court records showed that the hostage-takers were from former Soviet Central Asian countries; all the concert hall attack suspects are from Tajikistan.
The Times of Israel Community.