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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Insurgents under siege in southern Russia |
| 2005-01-26 |
| A group of up to eight Islamist insurgents remained besieged by police in two flats in a residential building in the capital city of Russia's southern republic of Kabardino-Balkaria's on Wednesday afternoon. The republic's interior minister, Khachim Shogenov, told journalists on Tuesday that the leader of the local "Yarmuk" Wahhabi group, Muslim Ataev, was among the trapped gunmen. Shogenov said Ataev was a major suspect in the December attack on the republican branch of Russia's drug-control service, in which four officers were killed and more than 250 firearms stolen. Ataev and his Yarmuk group have been also accused in an attack on police near the republic's capital, Nalchik, last August, in which two officers were killed. The militants reportedly have been living with their families in the two rented flats in the besieged five-storey building. Police surrounded it late on Tuesday, demanding that the militants surrender. Other tenants were evacuated from their apartments. Negotiations - conducted via telephone - continued through the night and Wednesday. The militants, with Ataev's wife and a child, demanded safe passage from the city. That demand has been refused. Interior Minister Shogenov told journalists on Wednesday that the militants were ready to surrender, but that Ataev had forbidden them to do so. A source in the republican Interior Ministry told Regnum news agency on Wednesday afternoon that a radio exchange had been intercepted, in which other Yarmuk members were bidding farewell to their comrades trapped in the building. Later on Wednesday, Shogenov told reporters that plans to storm the building had been set in motion for later on Wednesday. According to Russian security officials, Yarmuk was created by Balkar Wahhabis, followers of the austere fundamentalist brand of Islam, who fought against Russian troops in Chechnya under the command of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev. Balkars, an ethnic minority in Kabardino-Balkaria, were deported en masse by Joseph Stalin to Kazakhstan and Siberia in 1944, just like the Chechen, Ingush, and Karachai peoples. Representatives of these four ethnic groups form the backbone of the anti-Russian, anti-government insurgency in the Northern Caucasus. |
| Posted by:Steve |