Police kill four militants, surround others in Chechnya

Magomed Aliev

Ria Novosti, 17/12/2009, 19:05

Police have killed four Chechen fighters in a special operation in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said on Thursday.

Kadyrov said law enforcers had surrounded a group of militants, which might include leaders, in the southern mountainous region of Chechnya.

"Four militants were killed in the first hours," Kadyrov said. "Their identities are being investigated. Arms, ammunition and explosives have also been seized."

According to Kadytrov, police forces involved in the special operation found a militant winter base and surrounded it.

The Chechen president said that despite heavy snowfall and thick fog, the operation will continue in the region.

There are so far no reports of police fatalities in the operation which is expected to end in a few days.

Russia's mainly Muslim and ethnically diverse North Caucasus republics have been swept by an upsurge of violence recently, which has also swept neighboring regions, where hundreds of people have been killed in Chechen attacks and skirmishes between security forces and gunmen.

Moscow announced an end to its decade-long antiterrorism campaign against separatists in Chechnya in April, but has since had to step up the fight against militants as skirmishes and attacks on police and other officials have continued.

GROZNY, December 17 (RIA Novosti)

One killed, 18 wounded in terrorist act in Nazran - investigators

17.12.2009, 15.49

NAZRAN, December 17 (Itar-Tass) -

One person was killed and 18 people were wounded in a suicide bomb attack at a traffic control post in Nazran, sources from the Ingush Committee of Inquiry under the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office have told Tass.

They said the killed person is presumably the suicide bomber who had driven into a group of policemen and triggered an explosive device.

There are interior troops, road policemen and civilians among the wounded, they added. The terrorist act took place when police checks of vehicles with tinted windows were in progress on the Kavkaz federal highway.

“A suicide bomber on a Lada-Priora car drove into a group of law enforcement officers on duty, and triggered an explosive device estimated as equivalent to more than five kilograms of TNT,” republican Interior Ministry sources said earlier.

According to medics, ten people were wounded, four of them gravely, in the suicide bomb attack.

“Ten people injured in today’s blast have been hospitalized here,” a medic from the Ingush republican clinic said earlier. “The condition of four of them is qualified as grave – two are being operated on, and two are in an intensive therapy ward,” he said.