At least three prison workers and their four attackers were killed Friday during a hostage-taking at a prison in Russia’s southwestern Volgograd region, authorities said.
This hostage-taking lasting several hours, the second in a Russian prison in just over two months, seems, like the previous one, to bear the mark of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).
According to the Federal Prison Service (FSIN), the four attackers took eight prison employees and four other inmates hostage in “penal colony No. 19.”
“The criminals inflicted stab wounds of varying severity on four employees,” the FSIN said in a message late this afternoon on Telegram.
The final toll of the victims among the prison staff is not yet clear. Information communicated by the various authorities has alternately reported three or four dead and a variable number of injured.
According to the FSIN, the four attackers were “liquidated” while the four co-detainees taken hostage were injured.
Shortly before, the Russian National Guard had announced that it had “neutralized” the hostage-takers thanks to its “special unit snipers.”
The prison in question is a “severe regime” facility, meaning it has strict conditions of detention. It is located in the town of Surovikino, about 120 kilometres west of the regional capital, Volgograd.
The jihadist trail
Videos not authenticated by AFP tend to support the theory of an operation orchestrated by IS sympathisers.
A first video released by several Russian media outlets during the hostage-taking shows a room with a floor covered in blood.
It shows four men in fatigues, lying down and covered in blood, some apparently unconscious, and at least two other men filmed standing by a third individual speaking in Arabic.
Then the latter claims, in Russian, their membership in ISIS.
In the 46-second video, one of the men holds a knife in one hand and one of the alleged guards by the neck in the other.
Another video shows four alleged attackers, at least two of them holding knives, and one of them also holding what appears to be an ISIS flag.
“Everyone on our territory is obliged to respect and observe the laws of Russia,” the governor of the Volgograd region, Andrei Bocharov, responded on Telegram.
“We will not allow anyone to try to foment ethnic discord,” he added.
In mid-June, several members of the same jihadist organization were killed after taking two prison officers hostage in a prison in the Rostov region (southwest), near that of Volgograd.
Russia has been repeatedly targeted by attacks that the Islamic State group has said it is responsible for, although its influence there remains limited.
At the end of March, a particularly bloody attack near Moscow was claimed by IS: the attack on Crocus City Hall, a concert hall, where armed men killed 145 people, the worst attack committed on Russian soil in almost 20 years.