By Richard Balmforth

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's top man in Chechnya has been assassinated in a bomb attack that killed several other people, dealing a huge blow to the Kremlin leader's efforts to stamp out rebellion there.

Moscow's senior soldier in the rebel province was also fighting for his life after being seriously wounded by Sunday's blast, which tore through the VIP section of a stadium where dignitaries were gathered to celebrate the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany.

The exact number of dead was not clear. Itar-Tass news agency put the death toll at 14 but later quoted the Emergencies Ministry as saying there were only four dead. Other unconfirmed reports said the number of dead was much higher.

Putin himself, sworn in only on Friday for a second four-year term, announced the death of Akhmad Kadyrov, president of the region and a key player in Kremlin plans to crush the bloody separatist rebellion.

"Kadyrov passed away on May 9 on the day of our national holiday," a shaken-looking Putin said standing alongside Kadyrov's son, Ramzan, in the Kremlin.

Reuters journalist Adlan Khasanov, who was covering the event, was among those killed, his brother said. Khasanov, 33, had worked as both a Reuters photographer and television cameraman since the late 1990s, mostly in his native Chechnya.

The attack on the top-security event attended by military and political officials was one of the most audacious by Chechen rebels on Russian forces and the administration in mainly-Muslim Chechnya since Russian troops reoccupied the area in 1999.

"The bomb was placed inside a concrete part of the stadium," said Khamid Kadayev, Chechnya's deputy interior minister, speaking on television from the scene of the blast.

He said this meant the bomb escaped detection in security sweeps ahead of the event. He did not say how the bomb could have been smuggled in, but reconstruction work had been going on at the stadium for the past three months.

The commander of Russian forces in the region, General Valery Baranov, was among many injured. One of his legs was torn off in the blast and he was in critical condition undergoing surgery, Interfax news agency said.

Interior Ministry officials said an artillery shell, primed to explode, had also been found in a neighbouring stand.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Chechen Information Minister Taus Dzhabrailov quickly pointed the finger at rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov and Moscow's most wanted man, Chechen warrior Shamil Basayev.

"I think that only they could have organised an explosion at such an important occasion. The ground will burn under their feet," he was quoted by Interfax as saying.

Itar-Tass news agency quoted an Interior Ministry spokesman as saying five people had been detained in connection with the attack. It gave no details.

SURVIVED OTHER ATTEMPTS

The burly, bearded Kadyrov, who had survived several attempts on his life, was the linchpin of Putin's attempts to restore firm Russian rule in the north Caucasus region.

But the Kremlin leader gave no sign he would change course or make concessions to the rebels.

In separate comments to World War Two veterans, he said: "There can be no doubt that retribution is unavoidable for those whom we are fighting today. It will be unavoidable for terrorists."

Kadyrov, 52, a former rebel leader who switched sides and was viewed as a turncoat by separatists, was elected last October as part of a Kremlin plan to establish full Russian authority in the war-shattered region.

Interfax news agency said Sergei Abramov, at present Chechen prime minister, would take over as acting president.

Russia has been fighting separatists in the mainly Muslim northern Caucasus region of Chechnya since it first tried to break away in the 1990s. Moscow reimposed its rule in the capital Grozny in a 1999 invasion ordered by Putin, but guerrilla resistance continues.

Tens of thousands of people have died, including thousands of Russian servicemen, in two separate wars in the region in the past decade.

Chechen rebels have targeted official events and public gatherings for attacks in the past, and have also launched attacks in the Russian heartland, including Moscow.

Victory Day is a major national celebration of enormous symbolic importance in Russia and the Grozny ceremonies were mirrored by festivities throughout the country, including a marchpast on Moscow's Red Square overseen by Putin.

Russian pilots likely to go unpunished

By Lawrence Uzzell

Chances are fading that the Russian aviator or aviators who killed six young Chechen children and their mother on April 8 (see Chechnya Weekly, April 21) will face serious penalties. In an April 29 article for Novaya gazeta, Anna Politkovskaya reported that the federal military procuracy based in the Russian army's fortress at Khankala (outside Grozny) had finally opened a criminal investigation into the case - but was treating it merely as a matter of "negligence." In addition, she wrote, "none of the pilots has been detained, none has even been required to pledge that he will not leave the area, no forensic examination of the bomb fragments has been ordered…and no decision has been made about exhumation."

Paying the ultimate price for investigating atrocities

By Lawrence Uzzell

In both Chechnya and Ingushetia, one of the most dangerous things a local official can do is to investigate atrocities against civilians by federal military and security personnel. A May 3 article by Moscow correspondent Alex Rodriguez of the Chicago Tribune reported the heroic but futile efforts of Rashid Ozdoev, an investigator for the Ingush procuracy. Earlier this year Ozdoev submitted a formal report accusing Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) of human rights violations in Ingushetia. His father, a retired judge, pleaded with him to abandon his self destructive quest for justice - but the 30- year-old Ozdoev persisted. In March he submitted another report, this time to the FSB's national headquarters in Moscow.

According to the older Ozdoev, his son told him: "You can hardly imagine what kinds of terrible things they are doing to innocent people….I am paid exactly for monitoring the situation with human rights at these agencies. I cannot, in front of Allah, bring home my pay without doing the work I have to do."

On March 11 Rashid Ozdoev's car was halted by three other cars in northern Ingushetia. Ten gunmen wearing masks covered his and a companion's heads with bags and drove them away. He has not been heard from since.

Russian offcers found not guilty for civilian murders

By Lawrence Uzzell

In a verdict that casts further grave doubt on the rule of law in Russia, a jury trial before a military court found four Spetsnaz officers not guilty of the murder of six Chechen civilians. The jury concluded that Captain Eduard Ulman and his fellow officers had indeed shot dead the driver and passengers in a civilian automobile in January 2002, and had then set fire to the automobile with their corpses (see Chechnya Weekly, December 3). But according to an April 29 article on the Grani.ru website, the jurors decided that the officers "had not exceeded their authority."

Lyudmila Tikhomirova, lawyer for the dead Chechens' relatives, called the verdict "shocking" but added that "frankly, I had expected something like this. One can see this monstrous verdict as in effect providing a license for the murder of peaceful civilians."

Even Aleksandr Savenkov, chief of the military procuracy, told Grani.ru that he found the verdict self contradictory: On the one hand the jurors accepted as proven the fact that the Spetsnaz unit had killed six civilians, but on the other hand they declared that the accused were not at fault.

Akhmad Kadyrov denounced the verdict even more sharply. In an unusually harsh criticism of the Russian authorities, the head of the pro-Moscow administration in Grozny told the Novosti news agency that the trial's "unjust" outcome showed "that we Chechens still do not occupy our rightful place among the other peoples and regions of Russia…This will provoke an extremely negative reaction from our people, who are now under Russia's constitutional jurisdiction but are still not allowed to consider themselves to be real citizens of Russia. The families of the dead will appeal to higher authorities and possibly to international courts - and I, as president of the republic, will certainly help them seek justice."

On the basic facts of what happened in January 2002, there was remarkably little disagreement. Ulman and his defense lawyer claimed that he and his subordinates opened fire on the civilian vehicle only after its driver disobeyed a hand signal to stop and then ignored a warning shot into the air. The prosecution contended that the Spetsnaz troops opened fire directly on the vehicle without any such warnings. However, both sides acknowledged that most of the vehicles' passengers were still alive once it finally did stop. After finding that all the passengers were unarmed civilians, one of whom they had killed and two wounded with their first burst of gunfire, the Spetsnaz unit radioed to higher command for further instructions. They were ordered to kill all the remaining passengers and destroy the evidence - an order that they proceeded to obey.

Even if one accepts the defense's claim that the Chechen driver ignored Ulman's command to stop and that he and his troops had both a right and a duty to open fire, the Spetsnaz unit's subsequent behavior would seem to leave little room for doubt. With no possibility of fearing any threat from the surviving passengers, the Russian troops systematically and cold bloodedly shot every one of them. They then placed explosives in the dead Chechens' vehicle to destroy it; after the explosives failed to work, the Spetsnaz doused the vehicle with gasoline and set it afire.

The defense relied heavily on an argument that has probably been used more often than any other by war criminals all over the world: "I was only following orders." According to an April 30 account on the Gzt.ru website, the defense insisted that if the Spetsnaz officers had not obeyed the order to commit murder, they themselves would have faced a military trial and heavy penalties.

Russia's criminal code clearly states in Article 42 that a criminal act should still be considered illegal even if it is performed in obedience to an order that is itself criminal. Nevertheless, the Russian government's failure to obey its own laws is so widespread that it is reasonable to think that Ulman would indeed have faced punishment simply for acting in accordance with Article 42. Major Aleksei Perelevsky, who gave Ulman the radio order to kill the surviving passengers, claimed that he was only transmitting an order from a still higher level in the chain of command; he also was found not guilty.

There is no evidence from the published reports of the trial indicating that the authorities made any serious effort to bring to justice the officer who issued that order to Perelevsky. Most of the Russian media did not even mention that officer's name; an exception was Izvestia, in which an April 29 article by Yelena Stroiteleva noted that "the order to kill the unarmed Chechens was given by a Colonel V.V. Plotnikov, but he was not even summoned to the court as a witness."

In a May 2 talk show on the radio station Ekho Moskvy, Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya gazeta was asked why no charges where filed against Plotnikov. The reason, said Politkovskaya, was simply "that he categorically refused. He said that nothing of the kind had happened, that he had not given any such order, that Perelevsky himself had made the decision. Moreover, he had witnesses. They simply rescued Plotnikov from the blow which threatened him." When asked just who it was who had rescued him, she answered, "I think it was the military command at Khankala…because he is a colonel, an important person."

According to the Gzt.ru report by Arkady Yuzhny, the court in the southern city of Rostov-on-the-Don presented the jurors with thirty- five separate questions for which they had to decide on either "yes" or "no" answers. In Yuzhny's words, "the questions were so complicated, confused and ambiguous that Judge Aleksandr Kargin spent more than three hours on his final instructions to the jury, explaining in detail what they were to do and how they were to state their verdict in proper form."

When Ulman was released after the jury announced its verdict, some of the jury's members applauded in the courtroom, according to an April 30 article in the Los Angeles Times. The Stroiteleva article in Izvestia reported several parallels with last year's trial of Yury Budanov (see Chechnya Weekly, July 31). Both trials saw the mounting of demonstrations outside the courthouse by ultra-nationalists, shouting "Glory to Russia!" - and the presentation of flowers to the accused by their sympathizers.

The institution of jury trials is still a novelty in post-Soviet Russia, considered a victory for the rule of law after decades of "telephone justice" in which judges would obediently produce whatever verdicts were ordered by the Communist Party leadership. After the startling outcome of the Rostov trial, reformers now have reason to fear that this new institution will sometimes undermine rather than serve justice. If juries are going to be guided by militarism, xenophobia and other popular prejudices rather than by the facts before them, the path of legal reform is going to be even longer and harder than expected.

Politkovskaya sadly acknowledged on the Ekho Moskvy talk show that juries simply reflect society as a whole. The outcome of the trial, she said, "does not mean that the institution of the jury trial is itself discredited. What is discredited is our society…the condition in which we now find ourselves."

The chief military prosecutor Savenkov eventually told the news agency Novosti - perhaps in reaction to the public outcry - that the court's verdict would be appealed. "In Russia there is not and cannot be any law allowing one to murder peaceful citizens without being punished," he said.

Moscow rights group recognized for work with refugees

By Lawrence Uzzell

The Moscow-based human rights organization Memorial has received an award from the United Nations in recognition of its work for refugees, according to a May 3 report on the website Grani.ru. In expressing her and her colleagues' gratitude for the award, Svetlana Gannushkina of Memorial told the website that "the most important thing is that this forces the Russian authorities to look more positively on the activities of our non-government organizations."

The US$100,000 award from the UN amounts to less than five dollars for each of the 21,300 refugees who received help from Memorial last year. On the other hand, it represents less than one percent of the budget of the UN commission on human rights, which recently voted down a resolution on Chechnya.

Memorial has remained tenaciously independent of the Russian government - in sharp contrast to the United Nations itself, which of course is a cartel of governments and which usually refrains from offending its most powerful members. In terms of genuine credibility it is not Memorial that needs the embrace of the UN, but vice versa.