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.»
