MOSCOW, Aug 16: A series of guerilla attacks in Chechnya on Friday left at least 17 people dead, including five pro-Russian policemen and seven civilians.
Moscow rushed troops to the region but downplayed the attacks and dismissed a new Chechen proposal for a negotiated solution to the conflict.
The troops surrounded a village in a special operation “to stamp out a small rebel group”, the office of Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the Kremlin’s top advisor on Chechnya, told the Interfax news agency, quoting military officials in the North Caucasus.
Four policemen and two civilians were killed at Martan-Chu, 40 kilometres southwest of the capital Grozny, in a lightning raid by guerillas, who also made pre-dawn incursions into the neighbouring villages of Shalazhi and Gekhi-Chu, the Interfax news agency quoted local officials as saying.
Five Chechen civilians were killed and a Russian soldier wounded at Shalazhi during exchanges of mortar fire, the head of the pro-Russian Chechen administration Akhmad Kadyrov said.
Another policeman was killed with two others injured in pre-dawn attacks on federal positions in the southeastern Vedeno region, local police said.
Maskhadov envoy: Akhmed Zakayev, official envoy of Chechnya’s president Aslan Maskhadov, said on Thursday he had met former Russian security council secretary-general Ivan Rybkin in Switzerland to discuss ways of ending the war in the republic.
During a tete-a-tete in Zurich on Thursday, the two men worked out a plan for a solution to the conflict, Zakayev told Moscow Echo radio.
Zakayev said Maskhadov had tasked him with contacting Rybkin after the former security council chief had published an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin on the front page of the daily Kommersant in June.
Rybkin, who is now head of the Unified Socialist Party, called on Putin in the letter to start negotiations with Maskhadov.
“Our proposals, which were accepted by Ivan Petrovich (Rybkin), will enable peace to be brought to Chechnya,” Zakayev said.
The Russian authorities have ruled out all talks with Maskhadov since they launched a massive anti-insurgency campaign in the southern republic in October 1999 shortly after Putin became prime minister under then president Boris Yeltsin.
Rybkin told Moscow Echo radio that the proposals by the independence backers were “serious” and “realistic”, adding that they would be conveyed to Putin.—AFP