Landmine war underway in Chechnya

Ruslan Isayev, North Caucasus - On the morning of January 24 a "UAZ" jeep carrying Chechen policemen was blown up by an explosive device set up by unknown persons in the Saikhanova street in the Oktyabrski district of Grozny. Two of the policemen were wounded and two bruised by the strong explosion. Currently they are recovering at one of the municipal hospitals.
A day before in the Vosmogo marta street Russian army engineers discovered and defused an anti-tank landmine. The engineer corps inspect roads used by federal army convoys every day. During these inspections not a single civilian car is permitted to drive around, under the penalty of destruction and shooting of its passengers.

On January 22 two residents of the Mesker-yurt village disappeared after being detained during an identification check carried out in the village. One of them was a 10th-grade student returning home from school and the other was his neighbour, a young man named Doutkhanov.

Several days earlier another local resident had been detained under the same circumstances. Two days later his dismembered body was discovered in a field near the village of Tsotsin-yurt.

The remains of three blown-up bodies were found on January 19 near a pond in the Kulary settlement in the Achkhoi-Martan district. According to local inhabitants, the remains of human bodies had been strewn over an area 150-200 metres in diameter. Identifying them would have been hardly possible. The remains of the unknown bodies were buried at the local cemetery. (D/T)