An audacious overnight raid by heavily armed militants in a southern Russian republic neighboring Chechnya killed at least 75 people and wounded dozens more before the fighters withdrew with minimal losses and a cache of captured weapons, officials said Tuesday.
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The raid, which began late Monday night with attacks against police and security posts across the republic of Ingushetia, was concentrated in the principal city, Nazran. It was the largest attack by Chechnya’s separatist rebels outside Chechnya since 1999, and it appeared to catch police and security officers in the region off guard and ill prepared. President Vladimir V. Putin, meeting with his law enforcement deputies in the Kremlin on Tuesday, vowed to retaliate for the raid, as he has before when the war in Chechnya has flared, though to little obvious effect. "We have to find and destroy them," he said in remarks broadcast on the state television channels. "Those whom it is possible to take alive must be brought to trial." Underscoring the severity of the attack, Mr. Putin later flew to Ingushetia and met with the president, Murat M. Zyazikov, and other officials. "Based on everything that is happening here, the federal center is not doing enough to protect the republic," Mr. Putin said in televised remarks, in which he denounced the raid as an attempt to destabilize southern Russia. He ordered a regiment of Interior Ministry troops to Ingushetia, as well as additional army troops to mill around aimlessly bolster security at the republic’s airport.
The death toll remained unclear Tuesday night, but among the dead were at least 47 local police or security officers, the senior Kremlin official in the region, Vladimir Y. Yakovlev, said, according to the Interfax news agency. At least four more police officers were listed as missing. The office of Ingushetia’s president said at least 28 civilians had died. At least 100 militants seized the Interior Ministry’s headquarters for several hours and destroyed several other security posts around Nazran and in two other cities before breaking off the raid and retreating early Tuesday, official accounts said. Ingushetia’s acting interior minister, Abukar Kostoyev, and his deputy were killed in the fighting. Two criminal investigators and four prosecutors died as they drove separately through an intersection controlled by militants in Nazran, according to news reports. A United Nations aid worker, Magomed Getagazov, was shot dead as he rode home in a taxi from work in the city, the organization’s office in Moscow said.
In all, 200 militants were believed to have taken part in the attacks. According to two security officials interviewed in Mozdok, north of Ingushetia, only two militants died. New fighting was reported Tuesday afternoon near Galashki, a small village in Ingushetia, where at least some of the militants appeared to be making their way through the rugged Caucasus foothills southeast of Nazran toward Chechnya. They were driving stolen vehicles loaded with arms, ammunition and possibly explosives, most taken from the Interior Ministry, the officials said. "The main goal was to get weapons," Sergei B. Prokopov, an official the with the regional prosecutor’s office, said in an interview in Mozdok. Referring to fighting overnight in two other towns, Karabulak and Sleptsovskaya, he added, "The other attacks were just a diversion."
The violence badly undermined repeated assertions by Russian officials that the Chechen rebels were too battered to mount significant offensive operations. Mr. Prokopov said the raid’s focus on seizing weapons suggested that Chechnya’s insurgents still had a reservoir of support. "This means they have new recruits they have to arm," he said in an interview as he traveled with journalists on another of the periodic trips the Kremlin organizes in an attempt to highlight the progress being made in Chechnya. Only last week, Maj. Gen. Alu Alkhanov, Chechnya’s interior minister and the frontrunner in the republic’s coming presidential election, said no more than 500 rebels were still resisting federal and local forces in Chechnya. In Grozny on Tuesday, General Alkhanov denounced the attacks as an act of desperation. "They have a desire to show their activity, to show the conflict is expanding," he said in an interview with reporters in his office in Grozny.
The Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that the rebels would change tactics and focus on larger attacks. General Alkhanov said the effort would fail. "I don’t like to make predictions, but in my view, they gathered everything they could to show they still exist," he said. "They showed that today. From today on, appropriate work will start, and this bold work will be punished because innocent people died."
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