28 June 2004	Monday	09 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425

MOSCOW: A terrorist group seizes 70 hostages on an oil rig in the Baltic Sea, then blows it up: this is not the latest Al Qaeda attack, but the scenario of a joint Russia-Nato anti-terror drill that took place this week in the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

A loud bang is heard and a plume of dark smoke rises from the supposedly blown up rig, 15 kilometres off the Khmelevka military field on the West coast of the Kaliningrad territory.

"Forty people are wounded on the rig and up to 500 tons of oil have leaked into the sea. Rescuers are going to evacuate the wounded and to remove the oil from the sea to avoid an environmental disaster," a Russian official tells Western colleagues monitoring the drill.

A helicopter flies to the rig and starts evacuating the "wounded" to the mainland, where ambulances are waiting to take them to hospital.

The drill, code-named "Rescuers Without Borders" and staged by the US-led alliance and the Russian emergencies ministry, involved some 800 rescuers, including 80 Poles and Lithuanians, whose countries are EU and Nato members and surround the Kaliningrad enclave.

The exercises involved several aircraft and ships, including Russia's new Be-200 hydroplane, shown in action for the first time.

Russia's second-largest oil company, Lukoil, which operates 19 oil fields in the Kaliningrad enclave, lent three ships for the drill, while Poland and Lithuania contributed equipment to remove oil from the sea surface.

Russian Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu, who monitored the drill from a ship at sea, said the exercises were intended to have rescuers from different countries learn to coordinate their efforts.

"Rescuers from all over the world are one large family. The objective of this drill is to share our experience with our foreign colleagues," Shoigu told a press conference.-AFP