On-Don, Feb 19, SPA -- Russian security forces on Saturday surrounded a group of alleged extremists holed up in an apartment house in the southern Russian city of Nalchik and launched operations in other districts of the city, the Interior Ministry said. The standoff in Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkariya region, was the latest in a series of confrontations between law-enforcement authorities and alleged extremists in the volatile North Caucasus region, which includes Chechnya. Last month, security forces killed seven alleged Muslim extremists in the same city in a two-day battle with members of the so-called Yarmuk group. A duty officer at the southern district office of the Interior Ministry said that the extremists believed to be in the house on Saturday were also members of Yarmuk. An armored personnel carrier and riot police were at the scene, and security forces evacuated residents of surrounding buildings and cut off natural gas flows in the neighborhood. A spokesman for the Nalchik police department, who did not give his name, told Ekho Moskvy radio that 20 extremists were believed to be in the apartment house. Sergei Polyansky, spokesman for the southern district office, said that operations were also underway in several other districts of Nalchik, some 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) south of Moscow, to seal off other residential buildings.
