Posted on 01/16/2005 1:03:49 PM PST by HAL9000
MOSCOW : Russian security forces foiled a mass hostage-taking by pro-Chechen rebels in southern Russia on the scale of the bloody Beslan school hostage tragedy, media reported.A law enforcement source in Dagestan, which neighbours war-torn breakaway Chechnya, told the ITAR-TASS news agency that five militants cornered Saturday in an hours-long siege in the republic planned to seize a large number of hostages that day.
Last September, almost 350 people -- half of them children -- were killed after gunmen linked to the independence war in Chechnya took over a school in the southern town of Beslan and Russian troops stormed the building after a three-day siege.
The head of the FSB security service in Dagestan, Nikolai Gryaznov, said the siege and a separate assault on rebels hiding in a house in nearby Kaspiysk -- in which a total of four Russian troops died -- had averted a major terror act.
"The bandits destroyed in Kaspiysk and Makhachkala were preparing a terrorist act similar to Beslan," the Interfax news agency quoted Gryaznov as saying.
"We made use of intelligence information, carried out dozens of raids and searches. This allowed us to corner the criminal group preparing terrorist acts," he said.
A member of the Russian parliament from Dagestan told journalists that the militants had planned to seize a school.
"It was the same plan as Beslan, they were preparing to seize a school," lawmaker Gadzhi Makachev told the NTV channel.
In a gunbattle lasting more than 15 hours on Saturday, using heavy weaponry, special forces fought the five militants who had holed up in a house near the Dagestani capital Makhachkala.
A spokesman for the Dagestani interior ministry, Colonel Abdulmanap Musayev, told ITAR-TASS that a base used by the gunmen had been discovered with large quantities of weapons and bomb-making equipment.
The siege near Makhachkala began when a police patrol came across the armed rebels in the street early Saturday as they left to carry out the terror act, ITAR-TASS reported.
The gang were forced to barricade themselves in a house, taking hostage a family living there, but later released them.
NTV showed pictures of special forces with armoured vehicles firing anti-tank rockets at a burning building, which was levelled to the ground by a tank. The five gunmen, who had taken refuge in the basement, stopped returning fire by late evening Saturday, and officials said the bodies could be buried under the rubble.
On Sunday, special forces accompanied by bomb disposal experts and sniffer dogs looking for booby-trapped bombs searched the ruins of the two-storey building.
The Dagestan interior ministry spokesman said that during the operation in Kaspiysk two men had been arrested and a Dagestan rebel leader had been killed.
The Chechen conflict spilled over into Ingushetia and other republics of the region last year, climaxing in September's bloody seizure of a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, by gunmen said to include Chechens and Ingush.
Some 80,000 Russian troops are based in and around Chechnya, where a guerrilla war continues to rage more than five years since the latest conflict in the breakaway republic began.
The official death toll among federal forces is around 5,000 but anti-war campaigners say the real figure is at least two to three times that level.
Bump!
bump
Ping
these a*holes ain't got no shame, I hope they wipe these a*holes out
Well, good on the Russians...
Thank goodness they were not able to take another school.
BTTT
Ping
I'm glad to read no schools were taken.
Wanting to take another school....unreal!
;-)
Unreal for me.
Hard to wrap my brain around the concept of taking school children.
No problem. Just turn off any part of your brain that has any consideration of anyone else. Delete all ethics, morals, kindness. Add a persecution complex. Rub in a lust to force the entire world to conform to your views. Gentely stir in weapons, allow to fester for over a millenia...
Good job Russia. Now when the heck is Putin going to get even for the Beslan slaughter? Heck, Dubya, had the Taliban overthrown and Afghanistan liberated in less time than what it has taken Puty Poo to not yet respond.
You've nailed the jihadi disease formula.
Now, for the antidote...
MASSIVE doses of radiation?
NTV showed pictures of special forces with armoured vehicles firing anti-tank rockets at a burning building, which was levelled to the ground by a tank. The five gunmen, who had taken refuge in the basement, stopped returning fire by late evening Saturday, and officials said the bodies could be buried under the rubble.
See! when they say "we will count to five and we're coming in" they mean it.
That should do it.
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