BRIEFS

–DAGESTANI POLICE REMAIN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

A bridge over the Aktash River in Dagestan’s Khasavyurtovsky district was partially blown up by unknown perpetrators on March 29, Itar-Tass reported. Police officials told the news agency that no one was hurt in the incident. On March 28, a bomb was detonated as a police patrol car drove through an intersection in the capital, Makhachkala, regnum.ru reported. The car’s windshield was broken but nobody was hurt. On March 25, a bomb detonated on a road as the deputy chief of police in Makhachkala’s Leninsky district, Akhmed Magomedov, drove by, RIA Novosti reported. Magomedov received facial injuries. Meanwhile, the Kavkazcenter website on March 23 posted a dispatch from the Dagestani Islamic rebel group, the Sharia Jamaat, which alleged that a burial site had been discovered in the village of Zamai-Yurt in Chechnya’s Nozhai-Yurt district that contained the bodies of people abducted last December from the villages of Endirei, Mutsalaul and Novye Sasitli in Dagestan’s Khasavyurtovsky district. The Sharia Jamaat dispatch also alleged that the bodies of several Dagestani civilians kidnapped by “FSB gangs” and kadyrovtsy had been left near the Gerzel bridge on the Chechen-Dagestani border.

–CHECHEN POLICE PREVENT LARGE-SCALE OIL HEIST

Interfax reported on March 28 that Chechen law-enforcement agencies had prevented a large amount of petroleum products made from stolen oil from being smuggled out of Chechnya across its administrative border with North Ossetia. A source in the Russian military’s North Caucasus headquarters told the news agency that three trucks carrying over 70 tons of fuel and lubricants were stopped during an operation code-named “Chechen Oil” on the highway leading from the village of Isherskaya to the administrative border.