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| Caucasus |
| Russian police storm apartment |
| 2004-08-02 |
| Russian forces fired on an apartment block in a southern region bordering Chechnya on Friday, killing three rebels suspected of shooting dead two policemen the same day, an interior ministry spokesman said. Police fired heavy machine guns mounted on armoured vehicles into the block in the town of Kizlyar. Two other policemen were lightly wounded when the rebels returned fire. "The operation is over, the bandits have been destroyed. There were three of them, and they were destroyed on the spot," said the spokesman. Kizlyar, near Dagestan's border with Chechnya, has often suffered the overspill of the Chechen war. In 1996, it was the scene of a massive raid, when rebels seized a hospital and hundreds of hostages. It was not clear if the rebels killed on Friday were Chechens or local fighters. Chechen rebels have fought for independence from Moscow for a decade, and many Dagestani sympathisers have fought with them. Kidnappings, killings and bomb blasts have been rife in the Caspian Sea region for a decade. The two policemen had been killed earlier when they were investigating reports of an armed group, officials said. Russian news agencies reported the policemen came under fire when they stopped a car to check documents. The people in the car then ran into a nearby five-storey building. Police surrounded the building and attempted to negotiate with those inside before storming it, agencies reported. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |