MOSCOW, 1 July 2006 — Russia is offering a $10-million reward for information leading to the elimination of those who killed four Russian Embassy employees in Baghdad, the head of the FSB intelligence service said yesterday. “The counterterrorism committee will pay a reward of $10 million for information that permits the achievement of this goal,” Nikolai Patrushev was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.
He was referring to an order by President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, when, according to a Kremlin official, the president told Russian secret services to “take all necessary steps to find and destroy the criminals who committed this evil deed.”
The embassy employees were abducted when gunmen attacked their vehicle in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Mansur on June 3. A fifth Russian citizen was killed during the kidnapping. Since Putin issued the order, Russia has received numerous offers of help from foreign countries, said the president’s special representative for combating terrorism and international organized crime.
“We have already received responses from many overseas partners, above all the foreign affairs departments and the administrations of those countries whose armed forces are in Iraq,” Anatoly Safonov said yesterday.
Moscow confirmed the deaths of the four embassy staff after an Internet video purportedly showed two of them being executed. An insurgent coalition led by Al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility.
The hostage-takers had given Russia a 48-hour ultimatum to pull out of Russia’s war-torn province of Chechnya and free Muslim prisoners from Russian jails. Chechen rebels said they had nothing to do with the militant group in Iraq.
The order by Putin — himself a former senior spy — was unusual in being so open about such an operation on foreign soil and followed changes to Russian legislation to permit such operations. The order recalled the killing of former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar in 2004 in a car bombing that also wounded the victim’s 13-year-old son. Two Russian agents were convicted in Qatar of the killings, although Russia insisted they were innocent.
The killings of the embassy employees have prompted condemnation from many countries, including the United States and the European Union. On Thursday the United Nations Security Council issued a statement saying it was “appalled by the horrific death of members of the Russian diplomatic mission... who had been kidnapped by a terrorist group and later ruthlessly and in cold blood executed by their captors.”
Some analysts have questioned Russia’s ability to track down and kill the hostage-takers in the current lawless situation in Iraq, but others have pointed to the long-standing ties Moscow had in the country prior to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
