DUSHANBE, May 20. /TASS/. Tajikistan’s Interior Ministry has published the list of inmates killed in a riot in a strict-security prison near Dushanbe on Sunday night. The list was posted on the ministry’s website on Monday.
According to the list, 25 out of 29 inmates killed in the riot were serving their prison term for complicity in various terrorist and extremist organizations, including 17 members of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist grouping (outlawed in Russia). Among those killed, two were convicted for drug trafficking, another one for a theft and still another one for the desecration of human corpses and their graves, extortion, polygamy and other crimes.
Prison riots
The riots erupted in the prison in the city of Vakhdat located 20 km east of Dushanbe. The Tajik Justice Ministry said that the riots had been instigated by Islamic State militants, including Bekhruz Gulmurod, a son of Gulmurod Khalimov, a former Tajik special-purpose police colonel who had defected to the IS four years ago and had been killed in September 2017 in an air strike by Russia’s air task force near the city of Deir ez-Zor in north-east Syria.
As the Tajik Interior Ministry noted, the instigators of the riots "inflicted brutal stab wounds on three prison guards," as a result of which they died. After that, the riots’ instigators freed eight other fellow prisoners in penal isolation wards who were also members of the Islamic State terrorist organization. After that, the instigators brutally killed five inmates, beat and injured dozens of others for the sake of intimidation.
According to the Tajik Interior Ministry’s information, the rioters torched the prison hospital, took several prisoners hostage and attacked prison guards in order to run away.
As the Tajik Justice Ministry reported, "as a result of the counter-operation conducted in compliance with law, 24 members of that group were rendered harmless and 35 others were detained." The persons taken hostage were released, the ministry added.
Tajikistan’s Prosecutor General’s Office has opened a criminal case and an investigation is underway.
According to the data of the Tajik Justice Ministry, "a normal regime has been restored in the prison that houses 1,500v inmates and the situation is under control.".