Gunman slays five people in attack at Russian church

Churchgoers said they had prevented more casualties by closing the door to the church and stopping the attacker from getting inside.

A man carrying a knife and a hunting rifle opened fire on worshippers Sunday at an Orthodox church in Kizlyar, in the Dagestan region of Russia, killing at least five people and wounding several others, according to a Russian state news agency.

The gunman shouted “Allahu akbar” and began firing, a priest told the local media. Churchgoers said they had prevented more casualties by closing the door to the church and stopping the attacker from getting inside.

The man was later shot and killed by security forces on duty at the time, reports said. The assailant was identified only as a 22-year-old man from the region, the Russian news agency Tass said, citing the Investigative Committee.

The Islamic State claimed credit for the attack on the church, issuing a bulletin on its Amaq news agency, followed by a lengthier official statement in which the group described the assailant as a “soldier of the caliphate” and provided a nom de guerre for the attacker, Khalil al-Dagestani.

Some media outlets said there had been more than one attacker, whom they identified as a husband-and-wife team. The woman ran away just before the shooting started and has been arrested, reports said.

Four women died at the scene and a fifth died at a hospital, regional Interior Ministry spokesman Ruslan Gadzhiibragimov said. The gunman was a local resident, and his wife has been detained for questioning, he said.

The motive for the attack was not immediately known.

The attack took place in Kizlyar, a town of about 50,000 people on the Terek River delta on the border with Chechnya, Tass said.

Two Russian police officers were among four people injured in the attack, a Health Ministry spokesman, Zalina Mourtazalieva, told Tass.

Sunday was the last day before Orthodox Christian Lent and is celebrated as a holiday akin to Mardi Gras.

Tass said the man was later shot and killed. Photos circulating on media sites online show the body of a man dressed in camouflage pants lying on the ground, with blood around his head and empty cartridges scattered nearby. Other images showed what appeared to be a weapon.

Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim region between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea and is known, among other things, for widespread nepotism. Its administration has recently undergone a major cleanup that, according to some analysts, is meant to show the central government’s commitment to fighting corruption before presidential elections in March.

But two separatist wars in Chechnya have spread to Dagestan. In 2015, the Islamic State declared it had established a “franchise” in the North Caucasus. It has claimed a number of attacks on police in Dagestan in the past couple of years.