The severed heads of four Western hostages were discovered along a road Tuesday, more than two months after the men were seized by gunmen in the Chechen capital of Grozny.
The hostages -- Britons Peter Kennedy, Darren Hickey, and Rudolf Petschi, and New Zealand's Stanley Shaw -- were engineers working for Granger Telecom, a British telephone company.
Their heads were found about 25 miles (40 km) south of Grozny and were identified by a bodyguard. Chechen government officials at the scene said four bodies had been found as well, but gave no further details.
In Grozny, Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov said the slayings were a major blow to Chechnya and its efforts to gain international recognition of its independence effort.
The four men found dead Tuesday had been living in an armed complex as guests of the Chechen separatist government while they worked to install phone lines across the breakaway Russian province. A spokesman for Granger Telecom in Britain said, "We have heard the reports and are obviously investigating, but there is nothing we can say at this stage."
Chechen authorities said they had several suspects in the abduction, but have failed to make any progress.
The severed heads of four Western hostages were discovered along a road Tuesday, more than two months after the men were seized by gunmen in the Chechen capital of Grozny.There was a program about this on British TV last year. It has been suggested that the only people who wouldn't have wanted Grozny to have a mobile telephone network are the Russians. Due to the way the Chechen rebels had successfully used the electronic media to put out information during the last war. Therefore, it was suggested, that the FSB may have been behind the deaths of Peter Kennedy, Darren Hickey, Rudolf Petschi and Stanley Shaw. The resulting bad publicity would also have damaged the Chechen government.
However, I think that Chechen bandits are the most likely culprits. The question is were they just bandits, or were they also rebels who fought on behalf of the Chechen government?
I accept what you have said about Chechens sometimes biting the hand of friendship. I heard about a British girl who did voluntary service overseas. She spent several months in Chechnya working for Médecins Sans Frontières, but she was raped for her trouble.
The problem is, I don't like to extrapolate across the whole population. The Nazis used propaganda to paint the Jews as evil money grabbers in order to have an excuse to wipe them out. I dislike making generalisations about an entire nation on the basis of the actions of a group, even a large group of its people.