A battle took place on September 19 between members of the 102nd brigade of Interior Ministry Internal Troops and suspected rebels in a wooded area near the mountain settlement of Gubden, located in Dagestan's Karabudakhkentsky district. Gazeta reported on September 20 that the Interior Ministry... MORE

Writing in the September 19 edition of Novaya Gazeta, correspondent Anna Politkovskaya provided new details concerning the death of Aslan Maskhadov last March based on documents from the criminal investigation into the incident, including the testimony of four of his confederates who were taken into... MORE

--TREPASHKIN BACK IN JAIL Mikhail Trepashkin, the former Federal Security Service officer who investigated the alleged role of the FSB in the 1999 apartment building bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities and was jailed in October 2003 on charges of revealing state secrets, was... MORE

Six months have passed since the murder of Aslan Maskhadov in the Chechen village of Tolstoi-Yurt on March 8. There was speculation after the Chechen president's death about who would replace him as rebel leader. The Russian authorities did their best to inspire an armed... MORE

Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel on September 13 accused residents of Beslan who testified at the trial of Nurpashi Kulaev, the sole living Beslan hostage-taker to be put on trial, of lying. Shepel, a member of the team of prosecutors headed by Deputy Prosecutor General... MORE

Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov, meanwhile, accused North Ossetian President Taymuraz Mamsurov and the head of the republic's parliamentary commission investigating the Beslan tragedy, Stanislav Kesaev, of being unwilling to cooperate with federal investigators. During a September 7 press conference in Vladikavkaz, Kolesnikov claimed that... MORE

Chechen rebel leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev gave an interview to Gazeta Wyborcza that the Polish newspaper published on September 9. The separatist Kavkazcenter website published a Russian translation of that interview on September 13. Among other things, Sadulaev was asked whether the rebels' war is a... MORE

Col.-Gen. Arkady Yedelev, chief of the regional headquarters for counter-terrorist operations in the North Caucasus, told Interfax on September 12 that a total 231 rebel fighters had been eliminated and 890 rebels suspected of crimes arrested in sweep operations in Chechnya during the first eight... MORE

Unknown attackers fired on a police checkpoint on the southwestern outskirts of the Dagestani city of Buinaksk in the early hours of the September 13, killing one officer, Lt. Niyaz Gasanov, and wounding another. In the incident, which took place near a tuberculosis hospital, the... MORE

An explosive device detonated on the side of the Kavkaz federal highway in Ingushetia's main city, Nazran, on September 14, Itar-Tass reported. The blast occurred as a UAZ vehicle carrying officers from the Ingushetian Interior Ministry's patrol and checkpoint service was passing by. The ministry... MORE