On Transfer to US of Information on Discovery Among Chechen Terrorists of Technical Description of Boeing 737 and Piloting ManualThe United States has been informed of the discovery among Chechen gunmen of a technical description of the Boeing 737 and a manual for piloting this aircraft, Alexander Zdanovich, the Head of the Assistance Programs Directorate of the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia, has reported. "We immediately, as soon as we got this information, contacted our American partners," he stressed in an interview with RTR television. He recalled that such aviation systems were used by the terrorists who perpetrated the acts of terrorism in the US on September 11. "The people among whom this was discovered are members of the group of an Arab mercenary here in Chechnya who has contacts with Osama bin Laden," said Zdanovich. "We know that a number of gunmen and representatives of bin Laden were in Chechnya and may still be in the Pankisi Gorge, Georgia." As reported by the FSB Department for the Chechen Republic, the description of the Boeing 737 and the manual for pilots were contained on a laser computer compact disk, discovered in the hiding place of a bandit group led by a terrorist with the nickname Abdurahman the Little. A compact disk with an electronic map of Chechnya also was found in the same hiding place.
The hiding place was discovered in the house of women residents of Tsotsin-Yurt, a settlement in the Kurchaloi district of Chechnya, FSB Department officials said. Also in the hiding place were equipment for forging documents, a home-made contact explosive device, about 700 Makarov pistol and Kalashnikov submachine gun cartridges and Wahhabite literature. According to Zdanovich, an operational investigation is under way on this matter. He did not rule out that the FSB will obtain additional data, as the information on the diskette is being decoded.
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