Briefs

– Police Major Murdered in Kabardino-Balkaria

A police major was murdered in Kabardino-Balkaria on July 23, Kavkazky Uzel reported on July 25. According to the website, Akhmat Teberdiev, head of the criminal investigation department of the Elbrussky district police department, was shot in the back while he was parking his car in his garage. More than 20 spent cartridges were found at the scene of the shooting. As Kavkazky Uzel noted, it was the second attack on a law-enforcement officer in Kabardino-Balkaria in the past month. On July 7, a bomb blew up a car in which Zaur Khamdokhov, a captain with the anti-organized crime directorate of Kabardino-Balkaria’s Interior Ministry branch, was traveling in the Elbrussky district. He later died from his wounds. Meanwhile, the Caucasus Times reported on July 25 that officers from the Kabardino-Balkaria branch of the Federal Service for Control over the Trafficking of Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances and the republican Federal Security Service (FSB) directorate found a weapons cache near the Orthodox cemetery in the town of Terek containing a Kalashnikov assault rifle with two full magazines (60 cartridges), two projectiles for an antitank grenade-launcher, two F-1 and one RGD grenades, four fuses for grenades, one Nagan pistol, six cartridges for a Makarov pistol and one electric detonator, as well as three grams of a substance believed to be heroin.

– Troops Flown to North Caucasus for Mountain Brigades

ITAR-Tass reported on July 24 that two Il-76 military transport planes had transferred over 300 military servicemen from Kursk to Mozdok to form two mountain brigades in the North Caucasian Military District. “Earlier, 330 servicemen were brought in from Yekaterinburg,” the head of the Russian Air Force’s information and public relations service, Colonel Aleksandr Drobyshevsky, told the news agency. “In total, the Il-76 military transport planes are carrying out over 20 flights between July and August, transferring over 2,000 servicemen, special equipment and arms for the mountain brigades.” Meanwhile, Interfax reported on July 24 that a company of the mountain brigade recently established in Dagestan’s Botlikh district conducted a live-fire exercise at North Ossetia’s Daryal range.

– Putin: “Stabilization” in Caucasus Helped Win Bid to Hold Olympics

President Vladimir Putin attributed Russia’s successful bid to hold the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi to the “stabilization” in the Caucasus, ITAR-Tass reported on July 24. “I can tell you that we would have kissed goodbye to the Olympic prospects if we had not restored our territorial integrity, had not stopped the confrontation in the Caucasus and had not drastically changed the economic situation,” he told representatives of youth movements. “The success of the Sochi Olympic bid is the result of our activity, the activity of the entire Russian people over the past six or seven years. We would not have played host to the Olympiad without that.”