MOSCOW — Russian National Guard snipers on Friday killed four prisoners who had stabbed four prison guards to death and briefly held others hostage while declaring allegiance to Islamic State group.
The Federal Prison Service said four inmates took eight guards and four inmates hostage. It said they stabbed four of the guards, three of whom died on the spot and the fourth died later in a hospital. The authority said three other guards were hospitalized with injuries.
Russia’s National Guard said its snipers “neutralized” all four attackers and freed all the hostages, while the Federal Prison Service also claimed credit for killing the attackers.
The discrepancy could not be immediately explained. Details of the violence at the prison in Surovkino in the Volgograd region, 860 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of Moscow, were sparse and it was not clear how the inmates had taken hostages several hours earlier.
Videos purportedly from the scene and circulated on Russian media and messaging app channels showed men wielding knives inside and in a prison yard and several men in what appeared to be guard uniforms lying on the ground covered in blood.
In the videos, the alleged attackers claimed support for the Islamic State group and for the suspects arrested in the March terrorist attack on a concert in Moscow hall that left 145 people dead. An IS member claimed responsibility for that attack, in which gunmen killed patrons waiting for a popular music group to perform and set fire to the building.
State news agency Tass said court records showed the hostage-takers were from former Soviet Central Asian countries; all suspects in the concert hall attack are from Tajikistan.