Parliamentarian, FSB Officer, Policemen and Academic Targeted in Dagestan

A deputy in Dagestan’s People’s Assembly, Magomedgusein Nasrutdinov, was shot and seriously wound in the center of the republic’s capital, Makhachkala, on July 2, ITAR-Tass reported. As Newsru.com reported on July 3, Nasrutdinov is also the chairman of the board of directors of Daggaz, a subsidiary of Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled natural gas monopoly. In June 2005, the director of the Khasavyurt branch of Daggaz, Zubair Tataev, was murdered by gunmen who fired more than forty rounds into his car. Tataev was also a deputy in Dagestan’s parliament.

An officer of the Dagestani branch of the Federal Security Service (FSB) was wounded along with a companion in an attack at a hotel in Makhachkala, ITAR-Tass reported on July 2. The news agency quoted the press service of Dagestan’s Interior Ministry as saying that the suspects in the attack were seized at a private house in Khasavyurt along with forged identity cards for employees of the military and city prosecutor’s offices, two Makarov pistols with cartridges and 996,000 rubles (around $38,800). “The masterminds paid this money to the detainees for the murder of the security officer,” the Dagestani Interior Ministry’s press service stated.

Unknown assailants shot and killed two police officers in Dagestan on June 27, the Associated Press reported. The head of the anti-organized crime police unit in the town of Khasavyurt, near the border with Chechnya, died instantly when unidentified assailants sprayed the car he was driving with automatic gunfire, said Anzhela Martirosova, a spokeswoman for the regional branch of Russia’s Interior Ministry. She said that another police officer accompanying him died of his wounds later, while the attackers fled. An academic from the Dagestan Pedagogical University who was shot and wounded by an unidentified assailant on June 26 died in the hospital on June 27, Dagestan’s Interior Ministry reported.