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| Caucasus |
| Ingush corpse count now at 98 |
| 2004-06-24 |
| NINETY-EIGHT people were killed in this week’s militant attacks in the southern Russian region of Ingushetia. A top Russian military officer said three militants had been detained on suspicion of taking part in the spree of violence. The Itar-Tass news agency quoted Ingush Prime Minister Mogushkov as saying that the majority of those killed were from law enforcement bodies. Twenty-nine of the dead were police, 19 were soldiers, 10 were from the Federal Security Service and five were prosecutors, he said. Sergei Artemyev, an adviser to Vladimir Yakovlev, President Vladimir Putin’s envoy in southern Russia, said 125 people had been wounded. Three days after the Monday night attacks, questions still swirled about where the militants came from. Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former high official of the Federal Security Service, said in an interview published in the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta today that "it was, so to speak, an international squad" intent on destabilising Ingushetia, which borders on war-shattered Chechnya. As a rule, he said, destabilising forces come from outside. Chechen Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov, the Kremlin-backed candidate to replace slain Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, denied that a large number of the attackers were Chechens. "The evidence we have suggests that most of the gang members that attacked Ingushetia were ethnic Ingush, but it appears there were some ethnic Chechens and foreigners in the group as well," he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, the spokesman for Russian forces in Chechnya, said three of the alleged attackers had been detained in an Ingush town and belonged to a gang led by Doku Umarov, who has previously been accused of serious crimes in the region. "Measures are being taken to prevent rebel attacks on other North Caucasus regions," he was quoted as saying by Interfax. While authorities tried to piece together the events, a human rights group claimed yesterday that Interior Ministry forces were sweeping through a settlement of Chechen refugees in Ingushetia. Such sweeps, called "mopping-up" operations, are despised by Chechens because of their alleged abuse by troops. Usam Baisayev, of the Memorial human rights group’s office in Nazran, the republic’s main city, said organisation staffers alerted to the operation saw male refugees forced to lie face-down in the rain during the sweep. Mr Zyazikov, however, told the news agency Interfax that "there are no sweep operations whatsoever. All this is just made-up." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |