STARIYE ATAGI, Russia, 22 February 2006 — Eight-year-old Yelina Yusupova remembers the day her stomach was sliced by Russian mortar shells fired “by mistake” onto her Chechen village ­ adding her to a long list of the war’s collateral damage.

On Nov. 9 at 3 a.m., some 10 shells thundered down onto this village in the south of the secessionist republic, exploding in the Yusupov family’s yard and wounding five people besides Yelina.

Her grandfather Musa is still in hospital. The Russian military said they were fired “by mistake” from a nearby army base in the Shali district, whose forests give cover to insurgents and are often bombed.

Yelina was wounded in her stomach and underwent surgery in the children’s hospital number two in Grozny, but has still to recover fully.

“My daughter saw everything: The shells falling, her grandmother bleeding,” Aimani Yusupova recalled. Yelina has just returned to school after a three-month absence.

“A couple of days ago, I woke her up to go to school and she told me her dream - that they were shooting at us after we were wounded and still shooting as we tried to get to hospital.

“When she asked me, I promised this would never happen again,” said Aimani, who herself had been wounded.

“But that night we understood that we were still under that bombing’s threat, that the war was not over,” she added, countering Moscow’s assurances that Chechnya is at peace. “They are firing constantly. There is the heavy boom of explosions” during shelling from military bases in the mountains, explained Aimani whose young son Adam no longer sleeps full nights.

Despite an end to major clashes, the list of military and civilian victims grows weekly in Chechnya, swelling the lists of an estimated 100,000 civilians and 10,000 Russian soldiers already killed in more than a decade of conflict.

Russia’s media largely ignores the unrest, although television channels did cover last week’s death of a prominent cardiologist after an armored personnel carrier rammed into his car.

Although prosecutors said they had opened an investigation, such inquiries rarely end up in court.

“An investigator told us, unofficially, that the soldier in question was drunk,” Aimani Yusupova said. So far hearings against the driver, which are due to be held in a military court on the main Russian base of Khankala, have been repeatedly adjourned.

Last week, hearings were pushed back again “because not all the witnesses could come,” Aimani said.

The Stariye Atagi incident, however, has prompted some rare public demonstrations of up to 200 people in the capital Grozny calling for justice.