Dagestani Militants Continue to Target Policemen

Security forces in Dagestan launched a special operation in the village of Novosasitli in the republic’s Khasavyurt district on March 7. According to eyewitnesses, about ten military vehicles, including trucks and armored personnel carriers, entered the village and blocked all roads leading in and out of it. The security forces left the village late in the evening, but an eyewitness sent the Kavkazsky Uzel website a text message stating that while they were there, the security forces beat a driver of a car from another village along with his passenger, a young person suffering from Down’s syndrome, and stole money from them (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, March 7-8).
 
On March 7, the Investigative Committee’s department in Dagestan reported that it had identified a suicide bomber whose attack on a police post in the village of Karabudakhkent in Dagestan’s Karabudakhkentsky district on March 6 killed five policemen and wounded two. She was identified as 26-year-old Aminat Ibragimov, the widow of Zaur Zagidov, one of five rebel fighters killed in the special operation in the Karabudakhkentsky district village of Gurbuki on February 11. A source in the Investigative Committee told the Interfax news agency that Ibragimov’s remains had been identified by relatives (www.newsru.com, March 7).
 
For its part, the Lifenews.ru website reported that Aminat Ibragimov was the widow of Magomedkhabib Daudov, a 21-year-old rebel fighter killed in the February 11 special operation in Gurbuki along with his 51-year-old father, Ibragim Daudov. Law enforcement officials believe the elder Daudov, who was the leader of the Gubden jamaat, organized a failed New Year’s Eve suicide bombing in Moscow on December 31, 2010. According to Lifenews.ru, the March 6 attack on the police post in Karabudakhkent started with Aminat Ibragimov’s suicide bombing, which was immediately followed by an attack by six rebel fighters who burst into the half-destroyed police post and shot policemen who had been wounded in the explosion, killing three of them. Thus, according to this account, two policemen were killed in the initial bombing and another three who were wounded in the blast were finished off by the gunmen (https://lifenews.ru/news/84874).
 
The head of Dagestan, Magomedsalam Magomedov, on March 7 visited the scene of the attack in Karabudakhkentsky district the previous day. Speaking there, he said that “all effort must be made to find and punish the organizers of the terrorist act,” adding that the suicide bomber “had contacts in the district and lived there,” meaning she had “accomplices and helpers.” Magomedov said that “an atmosphere of universal condemnation and censure of terrorists” needs to be created and that terrorist accomplices must be severely punished. “All members of the public in the district must be involved” in that effort, he added (https://www.riadagestan.ru/news/2012/3/7/133358).
 
In another attack on March 6, two gunmen shot up a police post in the Dagestani city of Kaspiisk, killing one policeman and wounding a civilian who happened to be inside the police post’s office at the time of the attack. The attackers reportedly escaped in a taxi they seized at gunpoint from its driver, which was later found abandoned on the outskirts of the city. The taxi driver was not hurt in the incident. The civilian wounded in the attack died the following day in the hospital (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, March 6-7).
 
Also on March 6, the director of a medical school in the Dagestani town of Izberbash, Magomedrasul Gorurchunov, was shot to death by three gunmen. The attackers used a car commandeered at gunpoint to carry out the attack. The driver of the car was not hurt in the incident (www.newsru.com, March 7).
 
On March 4, the day Russians went to the polls to elect a president, three gunmen in masks attacked a voting station in a village in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district. Three policemen and one of the attackers were killed in the ensuing shootout (RIA Novosti, March 4).
 
Meanwhile, on March 5, Russia’s National Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAK) reported that 11 militants with connections to the North Caucasus had been arrested in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on March 3. The NAK claimed that those arrested had been involved in a “series of violent assaults and other brutal crimes in the Novosibirsk region” and that money they had obtained through crimes had been transferred to “bandit underground ringleaders” in Kabardino-Balkaria and Dagestan to finance terrorist activities there. The NAK also said the group had plotted a series of attacks, including the murder of policemen in order to seize their weapons. The committee said that five assault rifles, three pistols, two under-barrel grenade launchers, TNT, plastic explosive and other components for making bombs, four grenades, 2,000 cartridges, portable radio sets, laptop computers, camouflage uniforms, a “jihad” black flag and religious extremist literature had been seized from the suspects (Interfax, March 5).
 
On March 6, police in Kabardino-Balkaria’s capital, Nalchik, stopped a car being driven by a 26-year-old resident of the republic’s Chegem district and found a hand grenade, two rounds for a VOG-25 grenade launcher, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle and “extremist” printed material (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru, March 7).