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Russian Top Police Officials Die in Chechnya Crash http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20020127/wl/russia_chechnya_dc_6.html Sunday January 27 2:35 PM ET By Richard Balmforth MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian deputy minister and 13 others were killed on Sunday when a military helicopter carrying senior police officials crashed in rebel Chechnya, the Kremlin said. Accounts differed about what caused the Mi-8 helicopter to crash near Shelkovskaya, northeast of the regional capital Grozny. Some officials said it blew up in mid-air, leading to speculation that it had been hit by a rebel missile fired from the ground. Others said it was an accident. A Kremlin official said the helicopter carrying a group of senior officials including General Mikhail Rudchenko, a deputy interior minister responsible for security in southern Russia, crashed in late morning. All 14 people on board perished, the official told Reuters. The passengers included one other Interior Ministry general. ``The reason (for the crash) is being established,'' he said. Whatever the cause, the incident sounded another somber note for Moscow's policy in the North Caucasus region where Russian forces have been fighting to put down separatists since the early 1990s in a conflict that has claimed thousands of lives. The United States and other Western governments have urged President Vladimir Putin to reach a political settlement. But a contact between the Kremlin and a rebel representative last November failed to produce any concrete results. Though Russian forces say they control virtually all the territory of Chechnya, rebels in the mainly Muslim region kill troops almost daily in shootings and bomb attacks and have assassinated scores of pro-Moscow Chechen officials. REBEL FIRE? Officials quoted by Russian news agencies said the helicopter had exploded in mid-air, though they could not say if the explosion had been caused by rebel fire from the ground. ``The exact reason for the explosion of the helicopter has not yet been established,'' Major General Sergei Babkin, head of the Federal Security Service in Chechnya, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. But Nikolai Britvin, a deputy presidential representative in the region, said evidence pointed to an accident. ``There is no evidence supporting the version of there being a missile,'' Britvin told Itar-Tass news agency. ``Witnesses say there was smoke and that the helicopter then caught fire and fell.'' Rudchenko, who headed Interior Ministry forces for the region and was Russia's top police official for Chechnya, is one of the highest-ranking officials to have been killed there. Major-General Nikolai Goridov, deputy commander-in-chief of Russian interior forces, also died. Russian forces fought Chechen separatists in a 1994-96 war in which several thousand troops, civilians and rebels died. The Russian troops went back into the mountainous region and have occupied nearly all of Chechnya since early 2000, installing a pro-Moscow administration. But with no parallel political process they have failed to pacify the region. Some 150,000 refugees have yet to return. _______________________________ Copyright 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Copyright 2002 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.yahoo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Great stuff seeking new owners in Yahoo! Auctions! http://auctions.yahoo.com --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: [email protected] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
