BRIEFS

–FSB OFFICER ASSASSINATED IN INGUSHETIA

An FSB officer, Adam Gorzhkhanov, was shot to death on November 4 as he was driving on the Nazran-Karabulak highway in Ingushetia. Ingushetiya.ru reported that Gorzhkhanov’s car was fired on with automatic weapons from another vehicle that had overtaken it. Other cars were on the highway at the time the shooting occurred, and eyewitnesses said that it was impossible to tell how many people were in the attackers’ car because it had tinted windows. On November 8, an unknown attacker tossed a grenade through a window of the home of a police officer in Nazran, RIA Novosti reported. The police officer was slightly wounded. The Caucasus Times reported on November 2 that a resident of the village of Troitskoe Ingushetia’s Suzhensky district had reported to police that ten men in camouflage uniforms had forced their way into her home and kidnapped her husband.

–FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY FACES DESTRUCTION, HELSINKI GROUP WARNS

On November 2, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) issued a report stating that the Nizhny Novgorod-based Russian-Chechen Friendship Society (ORChD) is under “severe risk” of being destroyed by the Russian authorities. According to the Vienna-based group, the Russian authorities initiated “criminal and administrative procedures” against the ORChD in January 2005 that were “clearly politically motivated and aimed at destroying” the group, which the IHF described as ” one of the few independent and critical voices in Russia vis-a-vis the policy of the government in the North Caucasus.” On September 2, Stanislav Dimitrievsky, chief editor of the ORChD’s Information Center and its newspaper Pravo-Zashchita, was officially charged under paragraph B of part 2 of Article 282 of the Criminal Code (“inciting hatred or enmity on the basis of ethnicity and religion”), for allowing the publication of two peace appeals by Aslan Maskhadov and Akhmed Zakaev in March and April 2004. That charge carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. The local tax authorities have also accused the ORChD of tax evasion.

–CHINA SIGNS INVESTMENT DEAL WITH CHECHEN GOVERNMENT

Chechen Prime Minister Sergei Abramov told Itar-Tass in a telephone interview from Beijing on November 4 that the senior managers of the State Bank of China, Russia’s Vneshekonombank and the Chechen government had met and reached an agreement, as the news agency described it, about funding “major projects for the reconstruction and development of Chechnya’s economy. Abramov, who was part of the Russian delegation at the tenth summit between the Russian and Chinese prime ministers, said an agreement was being prepared on the sums, durations and uses of Chinese loan financing in Chechnya. “The money will go to implementing major infrastructure projects and also to creating capacity in various sectors of the economy including agriculture and housing construction,” Abramov said.