IS militants riot in Tajik prison: 32 killed

Three prison guards and 29 inmates have been killed in a high-security prison in Tajikistan after convicted Islamic State militants started a riot, the Central Asian nation's Justice Ministry said on Monday, reports Reuters.

The ministry said the riot broke out late on Sunday in the prison in the city of Vakhdat, 10 km (six miles) east of the capital Dushanbe, as militants armed themselves with knives and killed three guards and five fellow prisoners.

One of the instigators of the riot was Bekhruz Gulmurod, a son of Gulmurod Khalimov, a Tajik special forces colonel who defected to Islamic State in 2015 and, according to the ministry, has since been killed in Syria.

Security forces have killed 24 militants and restored order in the prison which has 1,500 inmates, the ministry added.

Islamic State, which at one point controlled large swathes of land in Syria and Iraq but has now lost its strongholds, claimed responsibility for another Tajik prison riot last November, which followed a deadly attack by its followers on Western tourists in July 2018.

The government of the Persian-speaking nation which borders Afghanistan fought against Islamists - who were allied with nationalists and liberal democrats - in a civil war in the 1990s which killed tens of thousands of people.

Tajikistan's leader Rakhmon is the longest-serving ruler in the former Soviet Union, having taken power shortly after independence, and tolerates little dissent.