TERROR BEHIND BARS

Russian Inmates Stage Deadly Takeover of Penal Colony

Unverified footage and media reports suggested hostage takers at IK-19 in the Volgograd Region may have ties to the Islamic State.

Four prisoners are dead after a riot at a maximum security penal colony in Russia’s Volgograd region escalated into hostages being taken and a stand off with state security services.

The prisoners, who described themselves as Islamic State militants, fatally stabbed four staff members before overtaking the facility, reported Reuters. The Russian National Guard told state media outlet RIA Novosti that snipers killed the prisoners “with four precise shots.”

“The criminals inflicted stab wounds of varying severity on the four employees,” the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) said in a statement. Three of the staff died on-site while one died of his wounds in hospital, according to RIA Novosti. Eight people, including four prisoners at the IK-19 facility, were held hostage.

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Unverified videos posted to social media show three staffers of IK-19 on the ground immobile and surrounded by blood. Multiple purported hostage-takers can be seen holding knives and one of them is holding an Islamic State (IS) flag.

Several Russian Telegram channels identified the perpetrators seen in the videos as four men in their mid-to-late twenties, all nationals of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. RIA Novosti reported that three of them were serving drug trafficking sentences.

Mash, a news outlet friendly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, reported that one of the attackers is accomplished in taekwondo, but did not have radical views, describing him as “quiet and calm.” The outlet said that three other hostage-takers were protégés of a radical Islamist group in the penal colony. Putin, meanwhile, was made aware of the incident, according to RIA Novosti.

The IK-19 colony, located in Surovikino, can accommodate roughly 1,200 people, according to the FSIN website.

If IS involvement were confirmed, it would mark the second grisly prison uprising linked to the transnational Salafi jihadist group in Russia since June, when six inmates took hostages at a prison in the southern Rostov region.

Last year, the Islamic State–Khorasan Province, an IS affiliate in central Asia, said it was responsible for a terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall that killed 145 people, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia since the 2004 Beslan school siege in 2004.

IS has repeatedly promised to strike Russia over its support of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator whose forces waged a campaign to drive the group out of Syria.

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