Apr 24, 2003 Posted: 11:25 Moscow time (07:25 GMT)
VLADIKAVKAZ - Three local officials from the Moscow-backed Chechen administration
were found dead in a car, a Chechen government official said Wednesday,
and the disfigured bodies of three young men who had been shot and killed
were found on the outskirts of the Chechen capital.
The three dead officials discovered Tuesday night outside Chechnya's second largest
city, Gudermes, included Vyacheslav Sanko, the deputy chief of the Gudermes district
administration, said the Chechen official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
They had disappeared three days ago while on a hunting trip, and their guns were
found in the car with them.
The corpses of the three young men found near the village of Michurino, just outside
Grozny, showed signs of torture, the official said. Their hands were tied behind
their backs, they had multiple bullet and stab wounds, and their faces were disfigured.
A preliminary investigation suggested they had been killed within the
last week.
The killings underlined the violence that continues to reign in Chechnya in spite
of the Kremlin's claims that the war has wound down and normality is returning.
As part of the campaign to prove normalization, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of
the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said Wednesday
that his agency would hand over control of what the Russian government calls its
anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya to the Russian Interior Ministry, which controls
the nation's police, this year, the Interfax news agency reported.
Russian Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Pankov laid blame for the violence on
the embryonic Chechen police force, which he said was manned by 13,000 officers.
He said that the security situation for civilians in the regions of Urus-Martan
and Achkhoi-Martan, as well as the Grozny suburbs, was worsening.
"How come they are unable to resist crime?," he was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass
news agency during an appearance in Grozny with the newly appointed Chechen interior
minister, Alu Alkhanov.
A Chechen policeman was killed in Grozny on Tuesday when his unit was shelled,
said the Chechen government official. One Russian soldier was killed and six were
wounded in rebel attacks over the past 24 hours, he said. Another serviceman was
killed when an alleged rebel blew himself up with a grenade during a search operation
by Russian troops in the village of Gekhi-Chu in the Urus-Martan region.
Meanwhile, Chechen administration chief Akhmad Kadyrov denied his prime minister's
statement that rebels had blown up a bus, killing 16 civilians, last week. Rebels
claimed on their web site that 17 Russian troops and Chechen police were killed
in the attack.
Kadyrov told NTV television that Prime Minister Anatoly Popov must have confused
the alleged explosion with a bus explosion earlier in the month in which at least
six civilians were killed and 11 injured.