Gunmen kills 22, including 15 policemen in Russia

At least 15 police officers and a priest were killed by gunmen on Sunday in what appear to be coordinated attacks on multiple places of worship in Russia’s southernmost Dagestan province, local authorities said.

Sergey Melikov, head of the Dagestan Republic, said at least six ‘militants’ were also killed following the attacks on churches, synagogues and police posts in the cities of Derbent and the regional capital Makhachkala, which are about 120 kilometers (75 miles) apart, reports CNN.

A priest killed during an attack on a church in Derbent was identified by Dagestan Public Monitoring Commission Chairman Shamil Khadulaev as Father Nikolay. “They slit his throat. He was 66 years old and very ill,” Khadulaev said.

A security guard armed with a pistol was also shot, Khadulaev said. The guard’s condition, along with the total number of victims, remains unclear.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, which come three months after ISIS affiliate ISIS-K claimed an assault at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow that claimed more than 140 lives in one of Russia’s deadliest terrorist atrocities in years.

Law enforcement agencies told state-run news agency TASS that the gunmen in Dagestan were “adherents of an international terrorist organization.”

Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim region home to a small Christian and even smaller Jewish minority. Russian security forces fought an Islamist insurgency in the mountainous region in the 2000s that spilled over from neighboring Chechnya, though attacks have become rarer in recent years.

The Muftiyat of the Republic of Dagestan, a centralized Islamic organization that previously reported on the casualties, has since deleted all posts associated with its count of those dead and wounded.