Russian prosecutors announced Friday that four people had been sentenced to a decade each in a penal colony for their part in an antisemitic riot at a Dagestan airport on October 29, 2023.
Hebrew media said it was the harshest sentence yet in connection with the attack, which saw hundreds of anti-Israel protesters storm the Makhachkala International Airport after a plane arrived from Tel Aviv, in a spate of unrest over the war in Gaza, which had been sparked three weeks earlier when Hamas attacked Israel.
Russian prosecutors said the three people who incited the violence on Instagram were still wanted by authorities.
Video footage from the riot showed the protesters, mostly young men, waving Palestinian flags, breaking down glass doors and running through the airport shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest). The airport closed for a week after being stormed, but no passengers were hurt.
Regional prosecutors in Russia’s southwestern district of Stavropol said on Telegram that the region’s Georgievsk City Court had found Marat Rabadanov, Radzhab Radzhabov, Magomed Ramazanov and Zaurbeg Khalikov culpable in the violence “on the grounds of ethnic and religious hatred and enmity toward citizens of Israel.”
The Kan public broadcaster said the sentence was the fourth, and the harshest, punishment meted out by the Stavropol court against members of the Dagestani mob in recent months.
The earliest convictions, in June, saw five men jailed for six to nine years each. Last month, another 10 people were sentenced to over eight years in prison, according to Russian media.
Kan said the trials have been moved from Dagestan to neighboring Stavropol due to concern that a Dagestani court would not hold a fair trial.
It was unclear if this meant that courts in Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region, were thought to be overly or insufficiently stringent.
According to the Stavropol prosecutors, the Dagestani mob had disrupted the Makhachkala airport’s operations, caused 24 million rubles ($233,000) worth of property damage, and committed “unlawful acts against 30 representatives of the authorities,” 23 of whom “suffered bodily injuries of varying severity.”
The mob 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 top prosecutorial body which is 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 as Ilya Ponomarev, Abakar Abakarov and Israil Akhmednabiyev, were still wanted by authorities, along with four other people who took part in the mob.
In all, SRK said it had completed preliminary investigations into 135 people involved in the attack and forwarded 28 criminal cases to the court. A total of 38 people have been found guilty in seven of the cases, the agency said.
Dagestan’s small, ancient Jewish community — known as Juhuri, which is also the name of their Hebrew- and Aramaic-inflected dialect — has been targeted by Islamist terrorists for years before October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza and precipitating a worldwide surge in antisemitism.
In June, the community’s 110-year-old Derbent Synagogue was burnt down amid a large-scale Islamist attack on non-Muslims in the area.