(Moscow) Dozens of men stormed the tarmac and terminal of the airport of Makhachkala, capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Dagestan, for several hours on Sunday, apparently in search of passengers on a flight from Israel.
After the intervention of the police, the Russian aviation agency announced that at 10:20 p.m. (3:20 p.m. Eastern time), the airfield was “emptied of citizens who had been there infiltrated without authorization.
The authorities of Dagestan had called on the rioters to “stop their illegal acts”, while estimating on Telegram that it was “not easy for each of us to witness the inhumane massacre of a civilian population, the people Palestinian”.
According to the specialized site Flightradar, a flight from Tel Aviv of the Russian company Red Wings landed at 7 p.m. local time (12 p.m. Eastern time) in Makhachkala. According to the independent Russian media Sota, this was a transit flight which was due to take off again for Moscow at 9 p.m. (3 p.m. Eastern Time).
It was currently impossible to know whether the plane was still on the tarmac and what the situation of its passengers was. The airport was closed until November 6, according to the Russian aviation agency.
According to Sota, after the arrival of this flight was announced, men first gathered in front of the airport to check the passports of people leaving, looking for Israeli citizens.
According to the Russian newspaper Izvestia and the pro-Kremlin channel RT, they then burst onto the roof of the airport and onto the tarmac.
Videos posted on Telegram show some of them breaking down barriers, trying to control cars leaving the airport or forcing doors into the terminal. One of the videos shows a man posted on one of the wings of a Red Wings plane.
A video still shows one of the men holding a sign: “Child killers have no place in Dagestan” and others shouting “Allah Akbar”. Some in the crowd waved Palestinian flags.
AFP was not immediately able to verify the authenticity of these videos.
While the incident was still ongoing, Israel called on Russia to “protect all Israeli citizens and all Jews.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office stressed in a statement that Israel “views with seriousness attempts to attack Israeli citizens and Jews around the world.”
Unstable republics
“What is happening now in Makhachkala is bad. Very, very bad,” RT boss Margarita Simonian commented on X.
The Minister of Information of Chechnya, the neighboring republic, Akhmed Dudayev, had called earlier in the day on Telegram for calm in the face of rising tensions in the Russian Caucasus, and to avoid “provocations”.
Attacks targeting Jews “will play into the hands of our enemies who are deliberately provoking the world in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said in a video.
Chechnya and Dagestan are two unstable republics in Russia whose populations are predominantly Muslim.
The war between Israel and Hamas entered its 23rd on Sundaye day. It was triggered by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7 on Israeli soil from the Gaza Strip. Since then, more than 1,400 people have been killed, the majority civilians who were shot, burned alive or died of mutilation on the first day of the attack, and 230 people have been taken hostage, according to the Israeli authorities.
In retaliation, the Israeli army relentlessly bombs the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas since 2007, and besieges this cramped Palestinian territory where some 2.4 million Palestinians are crowded together. For several days, it has also been carrying out land operations there. Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, claims that more than 8,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israeli bombings.