Russian police in the majority Muslim region of Tatarstan shot dead a teenage boy on Friday after he attacked a local police station with Molotov cocktails and stabbed a police officer with a knife, the region’s interior ministry said. Russia’s federal authorities have described the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack.”
In the early hours of October 30, a police officer in the town of Kukmor “noticed fire and shattered glass on the ground while parking his vehicle near the police station. An unknown perpetrator threw another bottle with explosive liquid in the direction of the parking lot, and then attempted to flee the scene,” Russia’s state-run news agency TASS reported. “Two police officers began to chase the perpetrator. After the policemen reached the man, he began to threaten them with a knife.”
“The young man did not react to repeated demands to stop the unlawful acts. He actively resisted arrest, causing several knife wounds to one of the policemen,” Tatarstan’s Interior Ministry said in a statement.
“The police officers were forced to open fire, shooting the man dead,” according to the ministry. The injured police officer has been hospitalized and is expected to survive.
Russia’s federal Investigative Committee said on Friday it had opened a probe into the “attempted terrorist attack.”
The teenager shouted “Allahu akbar” (“Allah is superior” in Arabic) and called police “infidels” during the rampage, according to Russia’s state-run RT news site.
“It’s true that he threatened to kill everyone. He shouted [at the officers] that they are enemies of Allah,” the Tatarstan Interior Ministry’s press service told Russia’s Daily Storm news website.
Russia’s Baza Telegram channel identified the teenager as 16-year-old Vitaly Antipov, according to the Moscow Times, which noted that Baza is “believed to have links to Russia’s security services.”
“Antipov allegedly posted a social media message ahead of the attack ‘calling for jihad’,” according to Baza.
“Tatarstan’s Spiritual Board of Muslims denied that the suspect had attended worship at any of its mosques,” according to Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
“Without naming the suspect, the [Tatarstan] regional education ministry spokeswoman said he was born in the Siberian republic of Altai and moved with his family 1,800 kilometers [about 1,118 miles] west to the republic of Bashkortostan, which neighbors Tatarstan,” RIA Novosti reported.
Kukmor, where the attempted terrorist attack took place on Friday, is a town of roughly 18,000 residents in Russia’s east-central, majority Muslim region of Tatarstan. Police in Tatarstan denied on Friday that the assailant had been on “an extremist watch list” prior to the attack, according to RIA Novosti.