Director's Last Stand

Honored artist turned out to be a terrorist

In Makhachkala on Saturday, local special services carried out another operation against militants. As a result of a fierce five-hour battle, they stormed a private house in which 30-year-old Gadzhi Melikov, one of the leaders of the terrorist underground in Makhachkala, was hiding with several accomplices. According to the Republic's Ministry of Internal Affairs, the sabotage group he heads has recently committed more than a dozen terrorist attacks and attacks on law enforcement officers in Makhachkala. As a result of the special operation, the owner of the house, a well-known theater figure and journalist in the republic, 69-year-old Zubail Khiyasov, who, together with the militants, continued to shoot back from the police until the last, also died.

As the Kirovsky District Department of Internal Affairs of Makhachkala said, at the end of last week they received information that Melikov and several of his accomplices were hiding in a private house on Kharkovskaya Street, 37. “The owner of the house where the bandits were hiding is a man respected by everyone,” said one from the heads of the police department. -- Zubail Khiyasov is an Honored Artist of Dagestan, was once the Deputy Minister of Culture of Dagestan, worked as a director of the Kumyk Drama Theater, and most recently was the editor of the Kumyk Radio. However, his two daughters were fanatical followers of Wahhabism and were married to terrorists. After making sure that the bandits were at home, we decided to detain them.”

According to the police, they secretly cordoned off Khiyasov’s house at about five o’clock in the morning and invited the militants to surrender. However, they responded with machine gun fire and threw several grenades. After this, the command was given to destroy the criminals. Khiyasov himself was one of the last survivors. “They offered him to surrender several times, but he kept shouting “Allahu Akbar” and shooting at the police. In total, the whole operation took about five hours,” the police department reported.

“Among those killed were Melikov, the owner of the house Khiyasov and the Magomedov brothers - 26-year-old Magomed and 21-year-old Ruslan, who were wanted for committing a number of serious crimes, including terrorist attacks,” the minister later said at a special press conference Internal Affairs of Dagestan Adilgerey Magomedtagirov. According to him, as a result of the battle, a child in the house, a relative of one of the militants, as well as Khiyasov’s wife Aida, received a gunshot wound in the forearm (according to other sources, it was not the owner’s wife, but one of his daughters who was wounded). One police officer also received a shrapnel wound to the face. During a search in the house, investigators found two machine guns, two pistols, several grenades and homemade explosive devices, which the sappers destroyed right in Khiyasov’s house.

“The murdered Gadzhi Melikov was trained on the territory of Chechnya in the Khattab camps, and was the personal bomber of the field commander Rappani Khalilov. He created his sabotage group two years ago. She is responsible for several dozen attacks on law enforcement officers, as well as numerous terrorist attacks in the city, which resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians, police officers and military personnel,” noted the head of the Republic’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. At the same time, according to him, “after the destruction of Melikov, a bandit group of five people remained in Makhachkala under the leadership of Shamil Hasanov.”

Alexey IVLEV