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4 police, 2 militants die in Chechnya gun battle
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 14 - 08 - 2009

ON-DON, Russia, August 14 , SPA -- At least four policemen and
two militants died in a gun battle Friday during a security
sweep near the Chechen capital, Grozny, in the latest
evidence of rising bloodshed in Russia's North Caucasus, according to AP.
Police also were conducting house-to-house searches in
Dagestan, Chechnya's eastern neighbor, for a gang that
gunned down seven prostitutes in a bathhouse and four
police officers at a road checkpoint.
The Chechen Interior Ministry said security forces waged a
1 1/2-hour firefight with two gunmen holed up in a house in
Kerla-Yurt northwest of Grozny. It said both militants were
killed, while at least four officers also died and four
more were wounded.
South of Grozny, five Interior Ministry troops were
wounded during an unrelated gun battle with militants.
West of the Dagestan capital of Makhachkala, police swept
districts in search of the gang responsible for the
bathhouse slaughter.
Police also shot and killed three militants south of
Makhachkala when they refused to stop their car, Dagestan
Interior Ministry spokesman Mark Tolchinsky said.
The rising violence throughout Russia's North Caucasus is
undermining the Kremlin's claims to be enforcing effective
law and order in the region.
While large-scale fighting from the two wars that ravaged
Chechnya since 1994 has ended, militants continue to mount
hit-and-run attacks and skirmishes with Russian and Chechen
security forces. Bloodshed has surged in recent months and
increasingly spilled into Chehnya's neighbors.
«Certainly, what is happening now is being heated up from
the outside, beyond the Russian borders. There can be no
other explanation. Dagestani people do not need to kill one
another,» Dagestan Interior Minister Ali Magomedov was
quoted as telling the Interfax news agency.
Police blamed extremists for targeting women who are
deemed to violate the moral standards of Islam and local
clan codes.
They said Thursday's bathhouse massacre in the city of
Buinaksk was a deliberate attack on prostitutes.
Also Thursday in Ingushetia, the province west of
Chechnya, three gunmen killed a woman who told fortunes.
Some Muslims consider fortune-telling to be immoral.
Human rights and aid workers in Chechnya also are
increasingly in the firing line. Zarema Sadulayeva, a
Chechen woman who helped maimed children, and her husband
were kidnapped and killed earlier this week.
Last month Natalya Estemirova, a prominent activist for
the rights group Memorial, was abducted and killed.
Memorial and other human rights groups suspended their
operations in the region.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was meeting Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday in the Black Sea resort
of Sochi, condemned the slaying of Sadulayeva and her
husband as «absolutely unacceptable.»


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