VIOLENCE CONTINUES IN INGUSHETIA

Two federal servicemen were killed in Ingushetia on August 3 when unidentified gunmen fired on a car carrying three members of a federal Interior Ministry mobile unit in Nazran’s Pliyevsky municipal district. According to Interfax, the third serviceman traveling in the car was unhurt. On August 2, two people, including a staff member of the criminal investigation department of Ingushetia’s Interior Ministry, were wounded when their car was fired on in the area of the Ingushetia-North Ossetia administrative boundary, Itar-Tass reported. The attackers reportedly fled in the direction of North Ossetia. On July 31, an improvised explosive device detonated 20 meters away from a mosque in the village of Troitskoye in Ingushetia’s Sunzha district. Interfax quoted law-enforcement officers as saying that the bomb, composed of TNT and bolts, had been placed in a sewer. Four cars were damaged but nobody was injured in the blast.

RIA Novosti reported on July 31 that three servicemen were seriously wounded when a vehicle carrying Interior Ministry troops was fired on by unidentified gunmen traveling in a passing car. On July 28, two military construction engineers were killed in Ingushetia when unidentified gunmen fired at a GAZ-2110 army jeep on the Kavkaz federal highway near the town of Barsuki. The gunmen reportedly escaped in a car in the direction of the administrative border between Ingushetia and Chechnya.

On August 2, the separatist Chechenpress news agency posted a statement by the North Ossetia-based “Jamaat Kataib al Khoul” claiming that “mujahideen” from its “Sunzha” group had attacked a group of “hypocrites” from the Ingushetian Interior Ministry’s criminal investigation department who had been carrying out a “reconnaissance” mission in the North Ossetian village of Maisky.