Chechen Warlord Frees Russian Hostages

A Chechen warlord freed 22 Russian police officers unharmed Wednesday, ending a four-day outburst in Chechnya that had threatened to stall Russia’s troop withdrawal from the separatist republic.

As the men left their captors’ outpost with a Kremlin negotiator, the Red Cross suspended relief work in Chechnya and evacuated its remaining foreign staffers after the slayings Tuesday of six of its aid workers.

The two incidents underscored the fragility of a month-old settlement to end the separatist conflict. That accord calls for Russia to pull out the last of its troops before Chechnya’s Jan. 27 elections.

Both sides condemned Tuesday’s slayings as a provocation by unidentified gunmen aimed at disrupting the vote. And both sides had brought pressure on Chechen field commander Salman Raduyev to free his hostages, whom he had threatened to kill.

Raduyev and his armed band seized the police officers Sunday after they barred the rebels from entering Dagestan, the neighboring republic in southern Russia.

The Russians branded Raduyev a criminal in January after he led a bloody hostage-taking raid on a Dagestani hospital.

Defying orders from his Chechen superiors to free the police seized Sunday without condition, Raduyev demanded instead that the Russian government apologize for restricting his freedom of movement.

He let the hostages go after talks Wednesday in the Chechen village of Noviye Gordali with Boris Berezovsky, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council.

Moscow’s Independent Television said Berezovsky, who then escorted the police officers to a Russian military base in Chechnya, had offered to free 11 Chechens held captive by the Russian side. The report could not be confirmed.

No one has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s predawn attack by masked gunmen on a compound of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Noviye Atagi, the Chechen village where the six slain relief workers had helped run a hospital. But each side continued to suggest that rogue elements of the other’s army might be the killers.

“Such a thing could be done only by renegades who fiercely hate not only the Chechen people but all humankind,” said Aslan Maskhadov, head of the Chechen government.

Russian intelligence agencies are widely suspected in Chechnya of staging attacks to discredit the separatists.

But for many Russians, Raduyev’s four-day rebellion underscores the Chechen leadership’s inability to control its fighters.

“There is no information in Moscow about the masterminds of the crime against the Red Cross,” Russian presidential spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky said Wednesday. “The masterminds of the crime are to be sought in Chechnya.”

Tens of thousands of people died in 20 months of combat between December 1994, when Russian troops moved to crush the Chechen separatist movement, and August, when the rebels recaptured their capital, Grozny.

Many foreign relief workers who set up in Chechnya early in the war left long before it ended.

Thierry Meyrat, head of the Red Cross office in Moscow, said the last of the Red Cross’ 35 foreign workers abandoned Chechnya on Wednesday, leaving five local staffers to help tend to 35 patients at the Noviye Atagi hospital.

“We cannot remain in Chechnya after what happened,” said Meyrat, who said the killings were “organized and executed by professionals.”