Four Russian servicemen were killed and four wounded when their truck ran over a mine in southern Chechnya during a day of rebel attacks that claimed 10 Russian soldiers’ lives in all, an official in the Moscow-backed Chechen administration said Thursday. Meanwhile, gunmen shot and killed the influential, 60-year-old head of a group of elders in the village of Znamenskoye, northern Chechnya, on Wednesday, the official said on condition of anonymity. The Interfax news agency quoted a Russian military spokesman, Maj Gen Ilya Shabalkin, as saying that the community leader, identified as M. Abdullayev, was probably killed because of his opposition to rebel recruitment of young men. The Russian military truck hit a mine in the village of Elistanzhi, in the mountainous Vedeno district, on Wednesday, the official said. The same day, two Russian soldiers were killed when one of them detonated a land mine while searching an abandoned building in the Chechen capital Grozny, the official said.
Four servicemen were killed and six were wounded in rebel attacks on Russian outposts over the past 24 hours, the official said. He said that the body of a member of the Chechen police force was found with bullet wounds in the outskirts of Grozny early Thursday. Rebels frequently target Chechen policemen, seeing them as Russian collaborators. Over the past day, Russian artillery shelled suspected rebel bases in the Vedeno district, and detained at least 120 people on suspicion of having rebel ties, the official said. Interfax quoted Shabalkin as saying Russian forces had destroyed a group of militants who took part in the overnight attack on the neighboring region of Ingushetia last month, which killed 90 people, outside Grozny. The militants attempted to open fire on a group of special services officers who surrounded their car and died when the special forces shot back and their car exploded, Shabalkin said.
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