Briefs

School Principal Murdered in Dagestan

A school principal in Dagestan was shot dead in full view of his students on May 22, RIA Novosti reported. A spokesman for the republic’s Interior Ministry told the news agency that unidentified gunmen traveling in a hatchback without license plates gunned down Budun Sharaputdinov with a Kalashnikov assault rifle as he was getting out of his car in the school’s car park, killing him instantly. The attackers then fled the scene. “Around 10 children witnessed the attack,” the spokesman said, adding that a number of the children would require counseling. Interfax reported on May 21 that a person suspected of involvement in the murder of policemen was killed during a special operation in the village of Semender on the outskirts of Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital. A police commando was also killed and another wounded in the operation. The rebel, identified as Nabi Atagadzhiev, a resident of the village of Karamakhi, was suspected of involvement in the May 15 ambush that killed two policemen in the village of Gubden (Chechnya Weekly, May 16).

Kadyrov’s Motorcade in Accident outside Moscow

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov’s motorcade got into a traffic accident in the Moscow suburbs on May 21, injuring two people. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the motorcade was traveling on the M4 “Don” federal highway toward Moscow when the driver of a ZIL truck, seeing the motorcade approaching from behind, tried to pull over to the right to get out of the motorcade’s way but hit another truck that was passing and was knocked into a Nissan Murano jeep, which in turn hit a Mercedes from Kadyrov’s motorcade, the rest of which proceeded onward without stopping. The driver of the ZIL was hospitalized with a fractured hip, while a two-year-old boy traveling in one of the vehicles involved in the accident received a concussion. As Newsru.com noted back in March, Kadyrov expressed concern about the number of traffic accidents in Chechnya and ordered that the rules of the road be enforced and observed, noting that many residents of the republic had complained that law-enforcement and military vehicles were themselves the cause of road accidents. Newsru.com reported that Kadyrov’s own 56-vehicle motorcade travels on Chechnya’s roads at speeds up to 170 kilometers per hour (around 105 miles per hour), which, as the website put it, “also increases the risk of creating emergency situations on the roads.”