Umar Dzhanbaruyev, who was involved in the criminal case over the mass unrest at Makhachkala airport in October 2023, has been killed while fighting in Ukraine, according to the head of Dagestan's Public Monitoring Commission. He is the second person involved in the airport riots known to have gone to the front and died there.

Shamil Khadulayev said Dzhanbaruyev's body was due to be taken to the village of Tarki for burial.

"Umar leaves behind four sons. This is already the second case of a participant in the airport events being killed in [Ukraine]," Khadulayev wrote.

The first was Mukhamad-Said Murtazaliyev, a father of three, who was buried on Jan. 13 in the village of Shamkhal.

According to Khadulayev, six other defendants in the airport case are currently fighting in Ukraine, while another person who went to the front returned with a disability. At least seven defendants in the case had previously been reported to have signed contracts with Russia's Defence Ministry.

Dzhanbaruyev's surname, however, does not appear in the published court rulings involving participants in the riots. Based on publicly available records, it is therefore not possible to establish which conviction he received or the length of his sentence.

More than 130 people have been convicted over the events at Makhachkala airport. Sentences have ranged from 6½ to 15 years in prison. According to the latest published figures, Dagestan resident Bakhtiyar Radzhabov, who was sentenced to seven years, became at least the 136th person convicted in the case.

What happened at Makhachkala airport

The mass unrest at Uytash Airport on Oct. 29, 2023, took place against the backdrop of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which had begun three weeks earlier, and widespread protests over the deaths of Palestinian civilians.

The immediate trigger was a wave of social media reports claiming that a flight from Tel Aviv was due to arrive in Makhachkala, along with rumours that people arriving from Israel would be housed in Dagestan.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the airport before the flight from Tel Aviv arrived. Some stopped cars and checked passengers' documents in an attempt to determine whether any of them were Israeli citizens. The crowd later broke into the terminal and onto the runway, forcing the airport to suspend operations.

The unrest came amid intense public anger in Dagestan over Israeli strikes on Gaza. The day before the airport incident, a similar gathering took place outside a hotel in Khasavyurt after unverified reports circulated that Israeli citizens were staying there. Calls to gather at Makhachkala airport were also spread on social media.

More than 20 people were injured in the unrest, including law-enforcement officers. Russian authorities classified the incident as mass rioting and subsequently launched a large-scale criminal investigation targeting those involved.

Russian investigators identified former State Duma lawmaker Ilya Ponomarev, Islamic preacher Israil Akhmednabiev, also known as Abu Umar Sasitlinsky, and Abakar Abakarov, a former administrator of the Telegram channel Utro Dagestan, as the alleged organisers.

All three were convicted in absentia and sentenced to between 15 and 19 years in prison.

In October 2025, reports emerged that Abakarov had been killed in Turkey. A Russian court later requested official confirmation of his death from Turkish authorities. Ponomarev and Akhmednabiev have been placed on Russia's international wanted list.