BRIEFS

–MILITANTS KILLED IN DAGESTAN

Two alleged militants died in a shoot-out with security forces in Dagestan’s Caspian Sea port of Kaspiisk, Interfax reported on February 7. Security forces reportedly fired on the home in which they were holed up with cannon and flame-throwers mounted on armored personnel carriers. The deputy head of the Interior Ministry department for the Southern Federal District, Sergei Solodovnikov, identified the dead militants as Kamal Amirov, a Kaspiisk resident, and Enver Veliev, a resident of Azerbaijan’s Kusarsky district, and said they were leaders of the Kaspiisk Jamaat, a branch of the Sharia Jamaat headed by Rasul Makasharipov, who was killed last year. According to Solodovnikov, the two militants were preparing two large terrorist attacks in the Dagestani capital of Makhachkala—the blowing up of an apartment building or the sabotaging of the railroad. Interfax on February 8 quoted the head of the Kaspiisk police department, Magomed Lakhiyalov, as saying that the militants were found with a list of high-ranking officials in the Kaspiisk administration and the local Interior Ministry department in Dagestan, as well as maps of the local Uitash airport and diagrams for a possible attack on planes landing at the field.

–FOURTEEN PEOPLE ABDUCTED IN CHECHNYA IN JANUARY

According Memorial, 14 people were kidnapped in Chechnya in January, Ekho Moskvy radio reported on February 6. The human rights group reported that seven of those abducted had been freed, five had disappeared without a trace, and two wound up in police custody and were under investigation. Memorial reported that nine people were murdered in Chechnya last month, including two civilians.