Russian special forces have freed two guards and killed six men linked to Islamic State who had taken them hostage at a detention centre in the southern city of Rostov, the prison service said.
State media said that some of the men had been convicted of terrorism offences and were accused of affiliation with IS, which claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall in March.
The six knocked out window bars and climbed down several floors by rope before taking the guards hostage with a knife and fire axe.
Before special forces stormed the detention centre, one of the hostage takers was shown by the 112 Telegram channel brandishing a knife beside one of the bound guards.
Automatic gunfire could be heard in footage from the prison published on Russian Telegram channels and video showed the six dead men in pools of blood.
“The criminals were eliminated,” Russia’s federal penitentiary service said in a statement on Sunday, adding that a “special operation” had taken place to free the hostages.
“The employees who were being held hostage were released. They are uninjured,” the prison service said. Ambulances were seen entering the complex.
IS, a Sunni Muslim militant group, was defeated in Iraq and Syria by a combination of US-led forces, Kurdish fighters, and Russian, Iranian, Syrian soldiers. It splintered into different regional groups that have claimed a number of deadly attacks across the world.
Islamic State Khorasan (Isis-K), named after an old term for the region that included parts of Iran, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, claimed responsibility for the March attack on the Crocus City Hall outside Moscow in which 145 people died.
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According to Russian media, the hostage-takers were from Russia’s southern republic of Ingushetia and three of them had been detained in 2022 for planning an attack on a court in another Russian republic, Karachay-Cherkessia.