Chechen fighters carried out large coordinated attacks in towns of Gudermes, Argun and in the Nozhay-Yurt district, south East Chechnya. Minor attacks were reported from other parts of Chechnya, including Grozny.
Chechen fighters shot down an Mi-8 military helicopter near Khankala, Russia‘s main military base in Chechnya. All 13 people on board, including general Anatoli Pozdnyakov, were killed.
A 12-member delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) arrived in Moscow on the invitation of the State Duma’s commission on the normalisation of the situation in the Chechen Republic. Its visit to Chechnya, which was scheduled for Sept 18-19 and should focus on the human rights situation in Chechnya, was cancelled, allegedly for security reasons.
Tuesday, September 18
No major events.
Wednesday, September 19
More than 500 people have been detained over the last two days in Argun, Gudermes, and the Jalka village, following the coordinated attacks on these places on Monday. So called „mopping-up operations“ were going on also in other parts of Chechnya and movement around the country was limited.
Thursday, September 20
Russia’s lower house, the State Duma, turned down a proposal made by five deputies for the Union of Right Forces which called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare a state of emergency on the territory of the Chechen Republic. 68 deputies voted for the proposal and 175 against it while at least 226 votes were necessary for the proposal to be passed.
Russian daily „Rossiysskaya gazeta“ published an official list of cases involving soldiers who have already been convicted for crimes they had committed on civilians during Russia’s military operations in Chechnya since 1999. The document, which the daily received from the office of Russian President’s Aide Sergey Yastrzembski, contains brief descriptions of 11 completed cases, involving 15 soldiers. About a half of the cases resulted in unconditial sentences ranging from 2 years and 6 months to 15 years of imprisonsment while the rest are conditional sentences and various penalties and bans. Amnesty applies to two of the eleven cases.
Salman Abuyev, the chief of the interior forces department in Kurchaloy, east Chechnya, and a close ally of the head of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed during an attack between villages Kurchaloy and Mayrtup. Abuyev, former member of Aslan Maskhadov’s bodyguard team in the first Russian-Chechen war and later chief of Ichkerian state buildings security team, turned away from Maskhadov at the very beginning of the present conflict.
Friday, September 21
Chechen representatives participating in PACE-sponsored two-day talks in Strasbourg on a political solution to the conflict in Chechnya issued a statement sharply criticising the activities of the Joint Working Group of PACE and Russia's State Duma and pointing at the zero progress since PACE's part-session in June 2001.
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