Russian FSB plane arrived in Tajikistan after riot of convicted Islamic State supporters

The Il-96-400VPU aircraft of the Russian Federal Security Service landed in Dushanbe yesterday. According to telegram channel Militarist, “there is an opinion that this is due to the rebel of IS supporters in a local prison.” As a confirmation there is a screenshot of the flight path of the aircraft, made through Flightradar24 (a resource that allows to track the flight of an aircraft in real time).

To recap, on May 19, riots occurred in Vakhdat, a suburb of the capital of Tajikistan, which resulted in the death of three guards and 29 prisoners.

It is known that about 30 people convicted of being connected with the Islamic State terrorist organization banned in Russia attempted to escape from prison and took people hostage, and later killed three prison officers. According to the representatives of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic, among the instigators was the son of the ‘Minister of War’ of Islamic State, Bekhruz Gulmurod. The department said that during the negotiations between the criminals themselves there was a skirmish, which ended in a shootout.

Earlier, representatives of the penitentiary system of Tajikistan visited Russian prisons to study the conditions of detention of those accused of terrorism.

As the Deputy Director of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia Valery Maksimenko told Moskovsky Komsomolets, now this category of convicts is kept in locked cells, they are limited in contacts with other convicts, which excludes possible recruitment and dissemination of radical ideas. However, convicted terrorists were under special control in the Federal Penitentiary Service even before. They were placed in separate units, and their correspondence, parcels, etc. were checked especially carefully. Any cell phone behind the bars is prohibited, but if it was found on a convicted member of a terrorist organization, the head of the institution immediately faced punishment up to dismissal.

Over the past few years, the number of people convicted under terrorist articles in Russia has tripled and now is about two thousand. They are mainly kept in prisons of Krasnoyarsk Krai and the Vladimir region. Two detention centers for mostly suspects of terrorism were chosen in Moscow – Butyrka and Lefortovo.

Anton Tsvetkov, Chairman of the Expert Council on Security and Citizens’ Relations with Law Enforcement Agencies, negatively assessed the prison system in Tajikistan. According to him, it is obvious that the operational work in the colony was not conducted at the proper level. Nor was the educational work for prisoners. In addition, the administration of the institution itself was not prepared for emergency situations, did not know how to respond adequately, which ultimately led to so many victims.

Of note, this is the second case of unrest in the colonies of Tajikistan over the past six months. In November 2018, riots occurred in the colony of strict regime in the city of Khudzhand in the north of the republic. Then, according to official figures, 21 prisoners and two officers of the colony were killed. Another five employees of the colony were injured.

The incident in Khudzhand caused a change of management of the Main Directorate for the Execution of Punishments of the Ministry of Justice of Tajikistan. Last week, eight employees of the Khudzhand colony were sentenced to various terms on charges of negligence. Almost 30 prisoners of the colony in Khudzhand are accused of organizing riots.

Source: Crime Russia