- Russia’s southern Dagestan region has reported a rise in the number of people killed in coordinated attacks.
- Gunmen attacked two churches, two synagogues, and a police checkpoint in two cities on June 23.
- Regional governor Sergei Melikov confirmed the increase to 22 from 21.
The regional head of Russia’s southern Dagestan region announced Monday that the number of people killed in a wave of coordinated attacks last month has risen to 22. Gunmen simultaneously attacked two churches, two synagogues, and a police checkpoint in two cities in Dagestan on June 23.
On Monday, regional governor Sergei Melikov announced that the number of those killed had risen to 22, up from a previously reported toll of 21.
Russian news agencies quoted Melikov as saying, “One police officer died the next day from severe wounds. In total, 17 police officers and five civilians were killed.”
The Kremlin dismissed fears that the attacks could signal a return to the kind of separatist violence that plagued the historically restive region throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The attacks occurred just three months after Daesh fighters killed more than 140 people in an assault on a Moscow concert hall, marking the deadliest terror attack in Russia in almost two decades.
On Monday, Melikov also stated that one of the assailants had participated in a riot at Dagestan’s main airport in October. Hundreds of men stormed the runway of Makhachkala airport in an anti-Israel riot after news spread on social media that a flight from Tel Aviv was scheduled to land in the Muslim-majority region.
The incident occurred amid rising tensions over the war in Gaza. In the June attack, assailants targeted two synagogues in Makhachkala and the city of Derbent, where Molotov cocktails started a fire that destroyed the interior of one building.
A Russian Orthodox priest was also killed. On Monday, Melikov also suggested that the West had been involved in inflaming the “ideological state” of the assailants, without providing evidence or specifying whom he was referring to.
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