A RIOT at a prison in Tajikistan left 32 people dead, including 24 members of Islamic State and three guards, authorities said yesterday.

Five of the inmates and the three guards were killed by IS prisoners during the riot that erupted Sunday evening, the justice ministry said in a statement.

The prison in Vakhdat, 17 km east of the capital Dushanbe, holds 1,500 inmates.

It said the prisoners first stabbed to death three guards, and then five other inmates “in order to intimidate” the others.

They then took other prisoners hostage before opening fire on the jail’s medical facilities.

“Following a reprisal operation, 24 members of this group were killed and 25 others arrested. The hostages were freed” and calm restored to the prison, the statement said.

One of the instigators of the riot was Bekhruz Gulmurod, a son of Gulmurod Khalimov, a Tajik special forces colonel who became the IS group’s “Minister of War” in Syria, where he was killed in 2017.

In November 2018, another riot claimed by IS left 26 people dead in Khujand, a city of 700,000 people in the northeast of the country.

(SD-Agencies)