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Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
Count Dooku's sister kidnapped
2005-08-12
A woman who is said to be a sibling of a notorious Chechen warlord, Doku Umarov, has gone missing in Russia’s restive province of Chechnya, the Interfax news agency reported citing its source in the local administration.

Natasha Khumadova, a resident of Urus-Martan, was abducted in the early hours of Friday by unknown gunmen, the republican Interior Ministry reported. Khumadova is a sister to Doku Umarov, a notorious rebel leader who is believed to have been involved in a number of heinous terrorist attacks, the police reported. The authorities suspect him of assisting Shamil Basayev in organizing a blast in Znamenskoye where 14 people were killed after a UAZ truck hit a mine earlier this summer.

A source in the Urus-Martan district administration told Interfax on Friday that several armed people broke into Khumadova’s house and threatening her with weapons led her away. The search for the woman was launched, the source said.
Could have been a wedding party.
Russian rights activists, on their part, do not rule out that Khumadova’s disappearance could be an act of what they describe as counter-taking of hostages aimed to exert pressure on the rebel leader. “For the time being the circumstances of the Umarov sister’s disappearance remain unclear but, perhaps, what we see here is the so-called counter-taking of hostages. Human rights groups have long voiced concern about that practice as being one of the most dangerous tendencies in Chechnya,” Dmitry Grushkin, spokesman for the Memorial human rights group said on Friday.

He recalled that earlier Doku Umarov’s father, too, was abducted, according to rights groups’ reports.

To recap, 8 relatives of the former Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, went missing in late 2004. After Maskhadov was killed during a security raid in March of 2005 all of them returned home, in June of 2005.
Posted by:Dan Darling

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