MOSCOW: The number of people killed in a wave of coordinated attacks in Russia’s southern Dagestan region last month has risen to 22, the regional head said Monday.
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 said the number of those killed had risen to 22 — after a previously reported toll of 21.
“One police officer died the next day from severe wounds. In total 17 police officers and five civilians,” were killed, Russian news agencies quoted Melikov as saying.
The Kremlin has dismissed fears the attacks could mark a return to the kind of separatist violence that marred the historically restive region throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
The attacks came just three months after Daesh fighters killed more than 140 in an assault on a Moscow concert hall, the deadliest terror attack in Russia for almost two decades.
Melikov also said Monday that one of the assailants had taken part in a riot at Dagestan’s main airport in October.
Hundreds of men had stormed the runway of Makhachkala airport in an anti-Israel riot when news spread on social media that a flight from Tel Aviv was due to land in the Muslim-majority region.
That had come amid rising tensions over the war in Gaza.
In the June attack, two synagogues were targeted in Makhachkala and the city of Derbent, where a fire started by Molotov cocktails completely destroyed the interior of the building.
A Russian Orthodox priest was also killed.
Melikov also hinted Monday that the West had been involved in whipping up the “ideological state” of the assailants, without providing evidence or specifying who he was referring.
Dagestan terror attack toll hits 22
https://arab.news/49nqa
Dagestan terror attack toll hits 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 said the number of those killed had risen to 22
Four killed in Ukraine as Moscow and Kyiv exchange drone strikes
- Kyiv said Russian drone strikes had killed two people and wounded seven more in Kharkiv
- Synegubov said two people had been killed in the attack on the Shevchenkivsky district
KHARKIV, Ukraine: Russian and Ukrainian drone strikes killed at least four people Wednesday, officials said, as the war between the neighbors dragged on for more than four years with no diplomatic breakthrough in sight.
The latest attacks came with a third round of three-party talks derailed by the war in the Middle East, despite pressure from Washington on both sides to agree to an elusive peace deal.
Kyiv said Russian drone strikes had killed two people and wounded seven more in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which lies close to the Russian border, was encircled at the beginning of Russia’s invasion four years ago.
It has been attacked almost daily since Moscow’s forces were pushed back later in 2022.
The governor of the wider region, Oleg Synegubov, said two people had been killed in the attack on the Shevchenkivsky district.
“A civilian enterprise caught fire as a result of the enemy strike,” he said, adding that three women and four men had been hospitalized.
Another Russian drone wounded 20 people in the afternoon, after hitting a civilian minibus in the southeastern city of Kherson, Ukrainian prosecutors said.
In the Russian-occupied part of the southern Zaporizhzhia region, Moscow-installed authorities said two civilians had been killed in their car by a Ukrainian drone strike on the frontline town of Vasylivka.
“The danger of repeated strikes remains,” Kremlin-appointed governor Yevgeny Balitsky said.
