At least 15 police officers and a priest were killed by gunmen on Sunday in what appear to be coordinated attacks on multiple places of worship in Russia’s southernmost Dagestan province, local authorities said.
Sergey Melikov, head of the Dagestan Republic, said at least six “militants” were also killed following the attacks on churches, synagogues and police posts in the cities of Derbent and the regional capital Makhachkala, which are about 120 kilometers (75 miles) apart.
A priest killed during an attack on a church in Derbent was identified by Dagestan Public Monitoring Commission Chairman Shamil Khadulaev as Father Nikolay. “They slit his throat. He was 66 years old and very ill,” Khadulaev said.
A security guard armed with a pistol was also shot, Khadulaev said. The guard’s condition, along with the total number of victims, remains unclear.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, which come three months after ISIS affiliate ISIS-K claimed an assault at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow that claimed more than 140 lives in one of Russia’s deadliest terrorist atrocities in years.
Law enforcement agencies told state-run news agency TASS that the gunmen in Dagestan were “adherents of an international terrorist organization.”
Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim region home to a small Christian and even smaller Jewish minority. Russian security forces fought an Islamist insurgency in the mountainous region in the 2000s that spilled over from neighboring Chechnya, though attacks have become rarer in recent years.
The Muftiyat of the Republic of Dagestan, a centralized Islamic organization that previously reported on the casualties, has since deleted all posts associated with its count of those dead and wounded.
Earlier, local authorities reported that at least nine people had been killed and 25 injured in the attacks.
The Muftiyat now says “law enforcement officers, clergy, and ordinary citizens” are among the victims but does not provide specific numbers.
One of the law enforcement officers killed was Mavludin Khidirnabiev, the head of the “Dagestan Lights” police department, according to the Dagestan Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Telegram channel.
Nighttime video, shared by the Republic of Dagestan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, showed at least a dozen law enforcement officers — who appear to be armed and wearing tactical gear — outside the gates of a cathedral in northwestern Makhachkala. CNN has geolocated the video to the gates of Svyato-Uspenskiy Sobor, a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Makhachkala.
(CNN)
