Three Policemen Wounded in Khasavyurt Attack

Three policemen were wounded in an attack in the Dagestani city of Khasavyurt, Interfax reported on November 1. The news agency quoted a source in the city’s police department as saying that the incident took place in the early hours of November 1 when unidentified gunmen opened fire on a UAZ police patrol car.

As Kavkazky Uzel reported on November 1, law-enforcement officers discovered a hidden cache of ammunition in Dagestan’s Karabudakhkentsky district on October 30. That same day, police in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, discovered a VAZ 2109 automobile containing an improvised explosive device that was set to go off. The bomb was defused. On October 25, gunmen ambushed a police patrol in a forest on the outskirts of the village of Adil-Otar in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt region. One policeman was killed and another injured in the ensuing gun battle. An explosion that went off in a minibus near Dagestan’s border with Chechnya on October 23 killed an 18-year-old woman who was apparently carrying an explosive device and injured eight passengers. In a separate incident that took place later in the day on October 23, a roadside bomb detonated in Makhachkala, injuring two people (Chechnya Weekly, October 25).

Also on October 23, attackers tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window of the home of the police chief in the village of Gubden in Dagestan’s Karabudakhkentsky district, burning the house down. On October 10, unknown gunmen opened fire on OMON officers near Gubden, wounding two offices, Interfax reported. In late September, Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov, the kadi (Islamic judge) of a local mosque in Gubden was killed when unidentified gunmen fired on him with assault rifles as he was heading for morning prayers. Dagestan’s armed underground Islamist group, the Sharia Jamaat, subsequently claimed responsibility for Gadzhimagomedov’s murder (Chechnya Weekly, October 4). It should be noted that Gubden was once the site of a training center for Islamist fighters that was eventually closed down (Chechnya Weekly, May 11, 2005).