Rebels Raid Russian-Held Chechen Capital

Separatists in Chechnya stormed its Russian-held capital at dawn Wednesday and started the worst street fighting there in more than a year. They seized and burned two police stations, took hostages, hijacked a train and, by evening, were clinging to control of two neighborhoods.

The surprise assault on Grozny followed three days of deadly Russian shelling of a smaller, rebel-occupied town and raised pressure on Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to end the 15-month-old war, which he calls a major obstacle to his reelection this summer.

Days ago, Yeltsin summoned his Security Council to meet today and adopt a peace initiative from seven alternative plans being weighed by two presidential panels. This week’s upsurge of fighting was a show of strength by both sides in advance of that effort.

Casualties in Grozny and the besieged town of Sernovodsk have not been tallied but appeared to add heavily to the running toll of 20,000 to 30,000 war dead in southern Russia, Russian news agencies and television stations said.

Wednesday’s assault was the first rebel effort to seize back Grozny since a Russian army invasion in December 1994 drove out Gen. Dzhokar M. Dudayev, the Chechen independence leader, and turned much of the city of 400,000 people into ruins.

Dudayev went on his clandestine television station during the rebel attack to announce that he had ordered it. “The city of Grozny will be taken,” he declared. “There will be no mercy for Chechen traitors.”

In a further embarrassment to Moscow and its puppet Chechen regime in Grozny, rebels broke into a Russian television broadcast and beamed Dudayev’s five-minute recording to other viewers in Chechnya.

Chechen officials said that at least 300 rebels launched the assault, hitting six Russian checkpoints on three sides of Grozny and pushing into the city. They seized unknown numbers of hostages, blew up three water-pumping stations, hijacked a train to Grozny’s rail terminal and shut down the railroad.

Russians mobilized tanks across the city and fired grenades from helicopters, according to reports from Grozny.

The Moscow-appointed special forces chief and nine other Chechen police officers were killed in the fighting, officials said.

Russian news agencies said there were rebel and civilian casualties but gave no count.

The fighting came on the heels of deadly combat in Sernovodsk, a village 65 miles northwest of Grozny in one of the few parts of Chechnya that the war had spared. Refugees from battle zones had doubled the town’s prewar population of 15,000, but after three days of Russian shelling this week just 4,000 remained.

Meanwhile, Russian news agencies reported the death of Salman Raduyev, a Chechen field commander who led a bloody hostage-taking in January and escaped army encirclement to become one of the most-wanted men in Russia. Raduyev suffered head wounds Sunday in an unexplained shooting in another part of Chechnya. The rebels have not confirmed his death.