NAZRAN, Aug 8: Russian troops and armed police combed woodland near Chechnya on Friday after guerillas killed six Russian soldiers and wounded seven others in a cross-border raid, local officials said.
The group that attacked Russian forces late on Thursday in Ingushetia, neighbouring Chechnya, with grenades and machineguns may have numbered up to 50 men, a senior regional official said.
Abukar Kostoyev, first deputy interior minister, told Itar-Tass news agency that police believed the attackers were headed towards Chechnya and may have already escaped back into the mountainous territory.
The ambush, the second deadly attack on Russian forces outside Chechnya in less than a week, may be part of guerilla tactics to extend hostilities outside the republic as Russia presses ahead with President Vladimir Putin’s peace plan.
Moscow wants Chechens to elect a new leader on Oct 5 to pull the carpet from under President Aslan Maskhadov, voted into office in 1997 during Chechnya’s three years of de facto independence.
On Aug 2, 50 people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed a truck laden with explosives into a Russian military hospital outside Chechnya where Chechen war casualties were being treated.
In Thursday’s incident, Russian troops, who had been on patrol in the Chechen capital Grozny, were returning to their base when they came under heavy fire shortly after crossing Chechnya’s administrative border.
The column, made up of two trucks and a light tank, was hit by rocket-propelled grenades and high-calibre machinegun fire. Six soldiers died and another seven were wounded in the ensuing firefight, news agencies quoted officials as saying.
But an Ingush police official said in the region’s capital Nazran that the tank had flouted security instructions prohibiting single military vehicles travelling in the danger zone. He said it was travelling on the road on its own, with troops seated on top, when it came under attack.
The official said police had found a discarded ammunition belt and blood stains at the site of the ambush, leading them to believe some attackers were wounded when troops returned fire.
In another setback for the Russians, the military lost an Mi-8 helicopter on a mission over southern Chechnya. One pilot died and two other crew members survived the crash.
Army officials in Moscow and Grozny gave conflicting reports as to whether the helicopter was shot down by the guerillas or came down by accident. But air force commander Vladimir Mikhailov insisted the craft came under heavy fire from the ground.
“They were flying along the river-bed and were fired upon from both banks,” Mikhailov said at a news conference.
ASSETS FROZEN: The United States on Friday designated feared Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev a threat to US national security and imposed financial sanctions on him, including a freeze on his assets.
Basayev “has committed, or poses a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of US nationals or the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a notice published in the Federal Register.
The State Department said the blacklisting of Basayev was done under various executive orders signed by President George Bush in response to the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.
In a separate but related announcement, the US Treasury Department named Mr Basayev a “specially designated global terrorist” along with another Chechen leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev.
Mr Yandarbiev, who signed a peace accord with former Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1996, appears to have kept a low profile since then, but Basayev has emerged as the main warlord in the mainly Muslim republic.
He has taken responsibility for a series of suicide attacks in May that killed nearly 100 people, as well as the deadly Oct 2002 hostage-taking at a Moscow theatre.
US officials accuse Basayev of having received millions of dollars from Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network.—AFP