MOSCOW - A Russian soldier shot four colleagues dead Monday at their base in Chechnya, before being gunned down, the National Guard they were members of said in a statement.
The soldier, a lieutenant, opened fire at around 4:00 pm (1300 GMT) in a barracks near the village of Shelkovskaya in the mainly-Muslim Chechnya region in southern Russia, the Interfax news agency cited the National Guard as saying. A group of officers have since been rushed to the area to investigate.
President Vladimir Putin created the National Guard security force last year, a move analysts said could be aimed at warding off unrest over the country’s economic crisis. The National Guard answers directly to Putin and is tasked with tackling terrorism and organised crime as well as maintaining order.
But armed attacks on authorities and forces are frequent in the Russian Caucasus.
The leader of Russia’s Islamist rebels, Doku Umarov, has been seeking to impose an Islamist state throughout Russia’s mainly Muslim Northern Caucasus region and has for years been waging a deadly insurgency against Russian security forces there.
In early October, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for an attack that left two policemen dead in Dagestan, the volatile region neighbouring Chechnya.
Russia has also received numerous threats of reprisals from Islamic State and Al-Qaeda since its military intervention in Syria in 2015.