(MENAFN- Afghanistan Times) AT Monitoring Desk
KABUL: A riot at a prison in Tajikistan has left 32 people
dead, including 24 members of the Islamic State, also known as Deash militant
group and three guards, authorities said.
Five of the inmates and the three guards were killed by IS (Daesh)
prisoners during the riot that erupted on Sunday evening, the country's justice
ministry said in a statement.
The prison in
Vakhdat, 17 kilometres (11 miles) east of the capital Dushanbe, holds 1,500
inmates.
It said the prisoners first stabbed to death three guards,
and then five other inmates "in order to intimidate" the others.
They then took other prisoners hostage before opening fire
on the jail's medical facilities.
"Following a reprisal operation, 24 members of this
group were killed and 25 others arrested. The hostages were freed" and
calm restored to the prison, the statement said.
Among the leaders of the riot, the Tajik authorities
identified the 20-year-old son of the former head of Tajik special forces who
became a member of the IS leadership in Syria, where he was killed in September
2017.
In November 2018, another riot claimed by IS left 26 people
dead in Khujand, a city of 700,000 people in the northeast of the country.
The riot had been initiated by a former IS member seeking to
spark a mass escape.
Daesh, which at one point controlled large swathes of land
in Syria and Iraq but has now lost its strongholds, claimed responsibility for
another Tajik prison riot last November, which followed a deadly attack by its
followers on Western tourists in July 2018.
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