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MOSCOW, Aug 20: Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov on Tuesday suspended an army general in charge of the air force for his role in a helicopter crash which killed at least 110 soldiers in Chechnya, RTR television reported.
The report said Colonel General Vitaly Popov, a decorated soldier who has been recognized as a hero of the former Soviet Union, was being suspended pending the conclusions of a report into Monday’s crash.
The RTR report further put the latest death toll at 114 soldiers. The army also suspended all flight of the massive Mi-26 helicopters over Chechnya for the duration of the inquiry into the crash, Russia’s worst loss in its latest 35-month campaign in the separatist republic.
MISSILE LAUNCHER: A discarded missile launcher has been found near the site of the wrecked helicopter, Interfax news agency on Tuesday quoted a military source as saying.
“The investigation group have found the weapon used in the crime, which is a “Strela” (Stinger-type) rocket system,” the source in the headquarters for Russian forces in the North Caucasus said, according to the agency.
GEORGIA: Russia said on Tuesday it doubted Georgia was serious about driving out Chechens from a remote gorge in the former Soviet republic, who Moscow claims have used the area in the Caucasus mountains as a rear base.
A foreign ministry spokesman in Moscow was reacting to an annoucement by Georgia at the weekend that it was planning to send troops to clear out “criminal elements” in the Pankisi gorge.
But the Russian spokesman, Boris Malakhov, said in a statement: “We cannot get away from the fact that this operation announced from on high is an erstaz intervention and that the fighters will be able to live there and carry on with their incursions against Russia and its population.”
Relations between Moscow and Tbilisi have soured since the resumption of the Chechen conflict in Oct 1999 amid Kremlin charges that Georgian authorities have done nothing to prevent incursions into Chechnya.
Russia has threatened to launch a military operation against an estimated 200 to 300 Chechens it claims to be sheltering in Pankisi.—AFP
