Killing of Pro-Moscow Official in Chechnya Seen as Retaliation

Gunmen killed the administrator of a village in the breakaway republic of Chechnya in retaliation for the slaying of a rebel warlord, officials said Saturday.

The warlord died in one of several Russian search operations that were condemned by an international human rights group.

Five masked men shot Alkhan-Kala administrator Ramzan Gasayev at point-blank range Friday night when he opened the door to his house, an official in Chechnya’s pro-Moscow administration said.

The gunmen left a note saying that the slaying was revenge for the death of Chechen warlord Arbi Barayev, who was killed in a military sweep of Alkhan-Kala last month, the official said, on condition of anonymity.

Russian officials said Barayev was killed during a military operation in which troops surrounded Alkhan-Kala, seven miles west of Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, and searched it for rebels.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based watchdog group, said Russian forces in Chechnya have arbitrarily detained hundreds and possibly thousands of Chechen men in a new round of sweep operations like the one in Alkhan-Kala.

Witnesses from several villages alleged torture, ill treatment and extortion of the detainees, the group said in a report Friday.

Russian officials in Moscow have denied that violations are taking place in Chechnya.

Human Rights Watch said that the sweep operations during the past 10 days have led to a new influx of refugees into the neighboring Russian republic of Ingushetia, where tens of thousands of people who have fled years of fighting in Chechnya live in squalid camps.

Pushed out of Chechnya in a 1994-96 war that left separatist rebels in charge, Russian troops reentered the southern region in 1999 in a bid to regain control.

Russian forces are deployed throughout most of the territory, preventing large-scale rebel operations, but rebels continue to unleash hit-and-run attacks that wound and kill federal servicemen almost every day.

In the latest fighting, rebels attacked federal positions and checkpoints 13 times during a 24-hour period, killing three Russian servicemen and wounding four, the pro-Moscow official said.

Six Russian riot policemen were killed and 12 were wounded Friday when their military vehicles hit land mines in Grozny, the official said.