NAZRAN, Russia, 23 June 2004 — Suspected Chechen fighters rampaged through a southern Russian region early yesterday, mounting a brazen onslaught that killed 57 people and raised new doubts about Moscow’s ability to stamp out separatist violence.
The fighters seized Ingushetia’s Interior Ministry building for several hours and attacked other top security installations.
“They must be found and destroyed. Those whom it is possible to take alive must be handed over to the courts,” President Vladimir Putin said angrily in comments at a Kremlin meeting with top security chiefs, shown on national television.
A Russian justice official said the fighters were trying to escape from Ingushetia into the neighboring region of Chechnya or the independent state of Georgia after the attack.
It was the biggest armed operation by rebels in the southern Russian province since war between separatists and Moscow erupted in Chechnya a decade ago.
Fifty-seven people — including 47 security and police officers — were killed, Tass quoted Interior Ministry official Beslan Khamkhoyev as saying. Earlier reports said 25 civilians had been killed.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said the dead included the acting regional Interior Minister Abukar Kostoyev, who had been in the building when it was captured. Another 60 people were injured. Two fighters had been killed.
Khamkhoyev said three suspects, of various nationalities, had been detained.
Ingushetia’s mainly Muslim people are ethnically close to the Chechens and have occasionally suffered spillover from the secessionist war in Chechnya, which borders it to the east.
Coming just six weeks after the assassination of Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, yesterday’s daring operation dealt a further blow to Putin’s assertion that the tide had turned in Moscow’s favor in its nine-year battle with the separatists.
The former spy chief came to power in 2000 by talking tough on the need to wipe out the rebels and sending in more troops.
But his failure to tame the rebels has done little to dent his popularity in the rest of Russia and he was re-elected by a landslide for another four-year term in March.
The coordinated strikes, concentrated in Ingushetia’s capital Nazran, led to fierce overnight battles as security forces fought to dislodge the rebels from the ministry building.
The rebels, who also raided police arms depots and seized weapons, eventually pulled out leaving behind bodies on the streets and the burned-out shells of a police headquarters and a building housing border guards.
Tass quoted police as saying a small army of up to 200 fighters staged the operation, that began with rebels tricking their way through checkpoints on a main highway.
Using false documents that identified them as members of anti-crime and special service squads, they commandeered the checkpoints and then gunned down police who turned out to answer the alarm, police said, quoted by Tass.
Footage broadcast by ORT Channel One television showed bodies of combatants and civilians lying in the streets, many of them charred and mutilated from the intense fighting. Witnesses said they had seen the bodies of many police officers in the ministry building which the rebels held for several hours before pulling out in the early hours.
A police officer who gave his name only as Timur said: “In our section alone, 30 people were killed and wounded.”
Chechnya’s interior minister, Alu Alkhanov, who has won the Kremlin’s blessing to run for the region’s presidency, said he had evidence that rebel warlord Shamil Basayev had masterminded the attack. Basayev, Russia’s most wanted man, has been behind many sensational rebel attacks over the past 10 years.
