Posted on 12/22/2002 6:46:02 PM PST by Sparta
Five Russian servicemen were killed and 12 wounded over the past day in Chechnya, where federal forces continued to shell suspected rebel positions and carry out security sweeps in search of insurgents, an official in the Moscow-backed regional administration said Friday. Three of the servicemen were killed in rebel attacks on Russian outposts, while one died when an armored personnel carrier hit a mine near Vedeno, in the south, and another was killed in a clash near Samashki in the west, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Four rebels died in the fighting in Samashki, the official said, while the ITAR-Tass news agency, citing an unnamed Russian military official, put the number at eight and said six of them were killed after being forced to flee into a minefield during the clash. The administration official said Russian forces shelled suspected rebels positions in southern Chechnya and conducted security sweeps in and around the capital Grozny and in three other districts. Rights groups say the operations are rife with abuses of Chechen civilians.
Also Friday, the Russian military said the leader of a rebel group operating around the village of Tsotsin-Yurt was killed in Grozny along with his brother, the Interfax news agency reported. Russian troops and Chechen police found and killed Said-Akhmed Vakhitayev after a rebel turncoat told authorities where he and his brother were hiding, said Col. Ilya Shabalkin, a spokesman for Russian forces in Chechnya, Interfax reported.
Shabalkin said the source also revealed the location of the Tsotsin-Yurt rebel group's weapons cache, and authorities found several weapons there including two Igla shoulder-fired missile launchers. Chechen rebels have used Iglas to shoot down several Russian helicopters. Russian forces pulled out of Chechnya in 1996 after a disastrous two-year war that left the separatists in charge, but returned in 1999 after rebel attacks in neighboring Dagestan and apartment-building bombings in Russian cities that were blamed on rebels.
Russian officials insist they are bringing Chechnya under control, and President Vladimir Putin last week issued a decree calling for a constitutional referendum and elections in the region, but Russian servicemen are killed nearly every day in rebel attacks and mine blasts.
Umar Avturkhanov, who headed a pro-Russian Chechen organization in the mid-1990s, warned Friday that the referendum would be meaningless unless all Chechens - including the hundreds of thousands of refugees - are able to participate, ITAR-Tass news agency reported. "Over 500,000 Chechen residents now live outside the republic and if the opinion of this number of people is ignored, such a referendum cannot be called an expressed will of the entire Chechen people," ITAR-Tass quoted him as saying.
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