--GEORGIA DENIES PANKISI CHARGES Georgia's Interior Ministry on October 12 rejected Russian claims that Chechen fighters are located in the Pankisi Gorge. Ministry spokesman Guram Donadze told RIA Novosti that the area is currently guarded as never before. "If [rebel] fighters get to Chechnya through... MORE

President of the pro-Russian Chechen government, Alu Alkhanov, visited Syria and Jordan in mid-September in his first trip to the Middle East. This trip recalled the objectives that former president Ahmad Kadyrov sought to achieve in Saudi Arabia in his inaugural visit to the region... MORE

Russian media reported on October 5 that President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who held talks that day and signed a joint statement on combating terrorism, discussed the issue of Akhmed Zakaev, the Chechen separatist envoy who received political asylum in the United... MORE

On the eve of the Russia-EU summit, October 3, a group of Russian human rights activists testified in Brussels before the European Parliament's sub-committee on human rights. The subject was human rights in Russia, particularly in the North Caucasus. Afterward, one of the participants, Tanya... MORE

On the eve of the Russia-EU summit in London, which took place on October 4, Amnesty International released a report entitled "Torture, ‘Disappearances,' and Alleged Unfair Trials in Russia's North Caucasus." The human rights group states in the report that what the Russian government calls... MORE

The Moscow City Court on September 29 granted a request by the Prosecutor General's office that the pre-trial detention of one of the suspects arrested for the July 2004 murder of Forbes Russia editor-in-chief Paul Klebnikov, Musa Vakhaev, be extended two months—until December 9. According... MORE

In its October 3 issue, Kommersant-Vlast published an in-depth investigation of the Islamist movement in Kabardino-Balkaria. A correspondent for the weekly, Olga Allenova, interviewed Andimirkan Guchaev, a young resident of Kabardino-Balkaria who studied religion in Saudi Arabia and who recently became the unofficial head of... MORE

--REBELS AND COPS EXCHANGE FIRE IN DAGESTAN Dagestan's Interior Ministry announced on October 5 that it had captured two suspects believed responsible for the killing of a police lieutenant and the wounding of a police captain at a police post in the republic's Buinaksky district... MORE

There are some questions that some nations avoid asking themselves just because they subconsciously know the answers. For a clearly articulated answer could become destructive for the state and therefore we shall never hear it. And that is correct. The question that I am going... MORE

President Vladimir Putin took several questions from residents of Chechnya in a live link-up from Grozny during his nationally televised three-hour call-in show on September 27. As the Moscow Times reported the following day, a woman told Putin her son had disappeared without a trace... MORE