2023-10-29 19:12:03
(Moscow) Following the announcement of the arrival of a plane from Israel, dozens of men stormed the tarmac and the terminal of the airport of Makhachkala, capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian republic of Dagestan, apparently searching for the flight’s passengers.
Posted at 3:12 p.m.
In the middle of the evening, the Dagestan authorities announced that the situation was “under control”, while specifying that the police were deployed in the airport and after calling on the crowd to put an end to their “illegal acts”.
The airport was closed and flights redirected to other airfields, according to Russia’s aviation agency, Rossaviatsia.
For its part, Israel called on Russia to “protect all Israeli citizens and all Jews.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office stressed in a statement that Israel “views with seriousness attempts to attack Israeli citizens and Jews around the world.”
According to the specialized site Flightradar, a Red Wings flight from Tel Aviv landed at 7 p.m. local time (12 p.m. Eastern time) in Makhachkala. According to the independent Russian media Sota, this was a transit flight which was due to take off again for Moscow at 9 p.m. (3 p.m. Eastern Time).
It was currently impossible to know whether the plane was still on the tarmac and what the situation of its passengers was.
According to the independent Russian media Sota, after the arrival of this flight from Israel was announced, men first gathered in front of the airport to check the passports of people leaving, looking for Israeli citizens.
According to the Russian newspaper Izvestia and the pro-Kremlin channel RT, they then burst onto the roof of the airport and onto the tarmac. Videos posted on Telegram show them breaking down barriers, trying to control cars leaving the airport or forcing doors into the terminal. One of the videos shows a man posted on one of the wings of a Russian Red Wings plane.
A video shows one of the men holding a sign: “Child killers have no place in Dagestan” and others shouting “Allah Akbar”. Some in the crowd waved Palestinian flags.
Unstable republics
“What is happening now in Makhachkala is bad. Very, very bad,” RT boss Margarita Simonian commented on X.
The Minister of Information of Chechnya, the neighboring republic, Akhmed Dudayev, had called earlier in the day on Telegram for calm in the face of rising tensions in the Russian Caucasus, and to avoid “provocations”.
Attacks targeting Jews “will play into the hands of our enemies who are deliberately provoking the world in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said in a video.
Chechnya and Dagestan are two unstable republics in Russia whose populations are predominantly Muslim.
The war between Israel and Hamas entered its 23rd day on Sunday. It was triggered by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7 on Israeli soil from the Gaza Strip. Since then, more than 1,400 people have been killed, the majority civilians who were shot, burned alive or died of mutilation on the first day of the attack, and 230 people have been taken hostage, according to the Israeli authorities.
In retaliation, the Israeli army relentlessly bombs the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas since 2007, and besieges this cramped Palestinian territory where some 2.4 million Palestinians are crowded together. For several days, it has also been carrying out land operations there. Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, claims that more than 8,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israeli bombings.
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