A civilian and a gunman were killed and two policemen were wounded early on Wednesday during a raid in Makhachkala, the capital of Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan, bordering restive Chechnya, the Itar-Tass news agency reported. The raid was aimed at neutralizing a group of gunmen who had seized a private residential house, a spokesman for the Dagestani republic’s Interior Ministry told Itar-Tass.
According to Khabib Magomedov, a civilian invited to act as a witness during a search was killed in an exchange of fire between police and gunmen. According to the press service, a gunman was killed and another was wounded. Immediate reports have said that two policemen were also wounded in the operation. Police examined a three-story residence where the gunmen were hiding and found Islamist books there. Unofficial reports said some of the gunmen had managed to escape.
The internal republic of Dagestan has suffered a spate of terrorist attacks in recent days, with two police killed in an attack on a police post on Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, engineers defused a powerful explosive device found near a theater in Makhachkala and on Monday, a regional lawmaker was shot dead in his car in a western part of the province. 10 Interior Ministry troops died last Friday in the capital Makhachkala when their truck was blown up outside a public bathhouse. On Monday the heads of the police force in the republic’s capital Makhachkala were fired over their inability to cope with the situation. |