Anti-Israel riot in Dagestan: 4 people sentenced to ten years in prison

Russian prosecutors announced on Friday that four people had been sentenced to ten years in prison each for participating in an anti-Semitic riot at a Dagestan airport on October 29, 2023.

Israeli media reported that it was the harshest sentence ever handed down for the attack, which saw hundreds of anti-Israel protesters storm Makhachkala International Airport after the arrival of a plane from Tel Aviv. This attack was part of a wave of unrest linked to the war in Gaza, triggered three weeks earlier by the pogrom perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel.

Russian prosecutors said three people who incited violence on Instagram were still wanted by authorities.

Video footage of the riot showed the protesters, mostly young men, waving Palestinian flags, smashing glass doors and running through the airport shouting “Allah Akbar.” Was the airport closed for a week following the attack? No passengers were injured.

Regional prosecutors in the Stavropol district in southwest Russia said on Telegram that the Georgievsk city court found Marat Rabadanov, Radzhab Radzhabov, Magomed Ramazanov and Zaurbeg Khalikov guilty of violence “for reasons of ethnic hatred and religious and enmity towards the citizens of Israel.

The Kann public channel said that this sentence was the fourth, and the most severe, handed down by the Stavropol court against members of the Dagestani mafia in recent months.

The first convictions, in June, were handed down against five men, each sentenced to six to nine years’ imprisonment. Last month, ten more people were sentenced to more than eight years in prison, according to Russian media.

Kann clarified that the trials were moved from Dagestan to the neighboring Stavropol region because of concerns that a Dagestan court would not be able to hold a fair trial.

It is unclear, however, whether this means that courts in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region, are considered too strict or not strict enough.

According to Stavropol prosecutors, the Dagestani rioters disrupted the activities of Makhachkala airport, caused 24 million rubles in material damage and committed “illegal acts against 30 representatives of the authorities”, 23 of whom suffered injuries. “bodily injuries of varying severity”.

The crowd was incited by a Telegram channel urging Dagestanis “to organize and participate in mass riots” against Israeli citizens, according to a statement by Russia’s Investigative Committee, the country’s main prosecutorial body, known by its Russian initials SRK.

The channel, which was later banned by Telegram, did not use the word “Jew”, but referred to “unclean” passengers arriving on the plane from Tel Aviv.

SRK said the channel’s operators, whom the agency named Ilya Ponomarev, Abakar Abakarov and Israil Akhmednabiyev, were still wanted by authorities, as were four others who participated in the riot.

The SRK said it had completed preliminary investigations into 135 people involved in the attack and had referred 28 criminal cases to the court. A total of 38 people were convicted in seven of these cases.

Dagestan’s small and ancient Jewish community – known as Juhuri, which is also the name of their Hebrew and Aramaic-inflected dialect – was the target of Islamist terrorists for years before October 7, 2023, date when some 6,000 Gazans including 3,800 terrorists led by Hamas stormed southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, kidnapped 251 hostages of all ages – committing numerous atrocities and perpetrating sexual violence on a large scale, sparking the war in Gaza and precipitating a global surge in anti-Semitism.

In June, the 110-year-old Derbent Synagogue was burned down in a large-scale Islamist attack against non-Muslims in the area.