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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Caucasus Corpse Count |
| 2006-06-10 |
| Gunmen raked a car with automatic fire Friday and killed a top police commander, his three young children and two other people in Ingushetia, a troubled Russian province neighboring Chechnya, officials said. At least four assailants opened fire from from both sides of the car that was carrying Musa Nalgiyev, chief of the OMON riot police in Ingushetia and his children, aged 4,5, and 6, deputy regional prosecutor Dmitry Gurulyov said. The OMON chief's driver and bodyguard also died in the gunfire, and the gunmen fled after the morning ambush in Karabulak, Gurulyov said. In a second attack, gunmen in a car shot a key administrator of a village close to the border with Chechnya in Russia's south, the Interior Ministry said. Galina Gubina died from his wounds in a hospital, the ministry said. She was in charge of a program to encourage ethnic Russians to return to the village. Most fled because of the fighting in Chechnya. On Thursday, a Russian rights group said it has documented the existence of an illegal prison in the war-wrecked Chechen capital of Grozny. It charged that detainees were bullied and tortured. Activists from the Memorial human rights organization said that they discovered the detention center last week and took videos. "We are talking about rampant violations of human rights," the group's head Oleg Orlov told The Associated Press. He said the center, which was set up by an Interior Ministry unit temporarily deployed in Chechnya in the late 1990s, should have been shut down when the unit was abolished and merged with local police troops in 2003-2004. But, he said, notes left by inmates and other evidence indicate that the prison continued functioning until last month. Alavdi Sadykov, who spent three months in the prison in 2000, told Memorial the police cut his ear off while trying to make him confess that he possessed explosive materials. He said that other prisoners were also tortured. "They would put you on this bench, your face down, then they would put a board on top of you and start hitting you with a hammer, beating our internal organs," Sadykov said, according to an interview transcript posted on the Memorial Web site. Oksana Rogozina, an aide to Chechnya's top prosecutor, told The Associated Press that criminal cases have been opened against several Interior Ministry officers for allegedly torturing detainees when the unit was functioning. Prosecutors are also investigating claims that the prison continued operating illegally, Rogozina said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |