Three prison guards and 29 inmates were killed in a prison riot in Tajikistan that the government blamed on ISIS militants.
Tajikistan's Justice Ministry said the riot broke out late on Sunday in the prison in the city of Vakhdat, 10 km east of the capital Dushanbe, as militants armed with knives killed three guards and five fellow prisoners.
The militants then torched the prison hospital, took several inmates hostage and tried to fight their way out. Security forces killed 24 militants in the battle to restore order in the prison, the ministry said. The prison houses 1,500 inmates.
The authorities said one of the instigators of the riot was Bekhruz Gulmurod, a son of Gulmurod Khalimov, a Tajik special forces colonel who defected to ISIS in 2015 and, according to the government, has since been killed in Syria.
