GROZNY, Russia, 30 August 2004 — A Moscow-backed policeman won Chechnya’s presidential election yesterday, according to early results from a tense poll marked by a bomb blast in which only the attacker was killed.
Acting President Sergei Abramov was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying Alu Alkhanov, who benefited from Kremlin backing and a publicity campaign that overshadowed his six little-known opponents, had won more than 50 percent of votes.
“The presidential candidate Alu Alkhanov, according to preliminary results... has already passed the 50-percent barrier necessary to become elected head of the republic,” Abramov said. Turnout was almost 80 percent.
The Kremlin-sponsored poll took place against the backdrop of heavy fighting and two deadly plane crashes that killed at least 89 people over Russia. With investigators saying traces of explosives had been found on both planes, many people have blamed Chechen separatists for the disasters.
Underscoring the violence plaguing Chechnya, a man identified as a wanted rebel was killed by his own bomb near a polling station in the capital, Grozny, an election official said.
The man ran off after being challenged by guards as he tried to enter the polling station. He was killed when the device he was carrying exploded, the official said. No one else was hurt.
Chechnya’s more than one million residents live in a region badly dislocated by war between separatists and Russian forces. Tens of thousands were killed on both sides in the first conflict from 1994 to 1996.
Putin sent troops back into the seething, mainly Muslim Caucasus territory on Russia’s southern fringes in 1999 to cement his image as a strong leader ahead of his own election. But total victory has eluded Putin, now in his second term, and the assassination of Kadyrov — Putin’s iron man in the region — by a bomb in May came as a heavy blow.
Putin is now counting on the 47-year-old Alkhanov, already marked for death by separatist rebels who brand the election a farce, who is seeking one of the world’s most dangerous posts.
Grozny, the war-shattered capital, was like a ghost town. Thick foliage has taken root in the ruins of wrecked buildings. The market was shut and the streets were deserted, lacking the usual bustle that elections involve.
Some 14,000 Chechen police were out on patrol alongside Russian forces. Security forces were mainly dug into sandbagged emplacements or deployed strategically in buildings overlooking polling stations.
Tree-trunks and metal obstacles had been erected the length of the road leading up to polling station 371, for example, to stop any suicide attackers driving bomb-laden vehicles into it.
The election was declared valid in the middle of the day after the turnout passed the required 30 percent mark.
Tension surrounding the election had been further heightened by growing evidence that the two passenger planes that crashed last Tuesday may have been blown up. Officials have refrained from blaming Chechens for the twin air disasters to coincide with the election, though theories in Moscow suggested that women, believed to be Chechen, took explosives on board and brought the two planes down.
The crashes followed a huge rebel attack in Grozny that killed as many as 120 people.
