Translated material
And again Rabbani
The Dagestan special services are wondering who they managed to destroy
The Dagestan city of Kizilyurt was declared a counter-terrorist operation zone for a day yesterday. For more than twelve hours, the special services waged a siege there on a residential building in which unknown militants were holed up. In the end, the building was completely destroyed and burned with the help of grenade launchers and armored personnel carriers, so the operatives had to clear the rubble and look for the bodies of the militants until late in the evening. It remains unclear who exactly the security forces managed to eliminate after a multi-hour battle; the investigators didn’t even really know how many bandits there were.Meanwhile, even before the end of the active phase of the special operation, the deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Southern Federal District (SFD), Sergei Solodovnikov, suggested that among the “destroyed militants there may be the leader of international terrorism operating in Chechnya and Dagestan, Rappani Khalilov,” one of the most dangerous and elusive criminals of Dagestan . Khalilov, nicknamed Rabbani, has, according to intelligence services, more than 60 terrorist attacks on the territory of Dagestan. The loudest of them was an explosion during a festive parade in the city of Kaspiysk on May 9, 2002 , which killed 45 people, including 17 children, and injured about 100. However, yesterday the operatives were unable to provide any material evidence of Mr. Solodovnikov’s words. And the very fact of indicating the names of killed militants before the end of the identification procedure was called “fortune telling by tea leaves.” Moreover, the special services have reported more than once about the “destruction” of Khalilov.
Law enforcement agencies have not carried out such large-scale special events in Dagestan since the beginning of the year. Since early Monday morning, shots have been heard in the Kizilyurt suburb, popularly called New Plans, and heavy armored vehicles have appeared on the streets. According to official information from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the fighting began at six o'clock in the morning. However, according to the stories of residents of this area, operatives have been preparing to seize the house where, according to operational information, armed men are located, since Sunday evening.
Even at night, some of the people living in the immediate vicinity of the suspicious household were evacuated. Others were warned of the danger and strongly advised not to go anywhere. By morning, about a hundred soldiers from the special forces center of the FSB, the FSB Directorate and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the republic, as well as heavy armored vehicles, had been gathered in Kizilyurt. They blocked the block where the militants were holed up and, over a loudspeaker, asked the people in the house to surrender. In response, heavy fire was opened. Several times the special forces tried to storm the one-story building, but without success. During the battle, two FSB officers were slightly injured. They were sent to the medical unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan.
After the house was hit several times with a Bumblebee flamethrower, the building caught fire and the shots died down for a while. However, firefighters were unable to get closer to the house. As it turned out, the militants moved to the basement, from where they again began to fire fiercely. The active phase of the special operation began around six o'clock in the evening. By this time, several dozen charges from grenade launchers and flamethrowers had been fired at the house, and the building was virtually completely destroyed and burned. By seven o'clock the resistance was broken.
Sappers, who had to sort out the ammunition remaining among the rubble, helped to break into the concrete basement, where, according to operatives, the corpses of bandits were littered. The first to be discovered was the body of a man and two machine guns. Local police identified the murdered man as a resident of Kizilyurt, nicknamed Abdurakhman. Investigators planned to clear the rubble all night.
Yesterday, operatives were perplexed on what exactly the assumption of the deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Southern Federal District, Sergei Solodovnikov, was based on, that among the destroyed bandits there could be one of the most odious of the surviving leaders of the Caucasian separatists, Rappani Khalilov. In the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs, Khalilov was called the organizer of all the latest terrorist attacks against security forces in Dagestan, in particular, he was responsible for the bombing of private security officers at a school stadium in the same Kizilyurt in July of this year. According to Chechen intelligence services, Rabbani also showed up on their territory. At the beginning of the year, he was allegedly spotted in the southeast of Chechnya.
Unlike Kizilyurt, where during the hours-long battle none of the security forces showed any serious compassion, in another Dagestan city, Khasavyurt, yesterday unknown bandits killed a policeman and a bystander. At about 6:30 p.m., on Groznenskaya Street, a traffic police squad from the Khasavyurt City Department of Internal Affairs stopped a silver Zhiguli, model ten, in which there were two men, to check documents. When the police approached the car, one of the bandits jumped out of it and fired at the patrolmen with a machine gun. The militant in the car was wounded by return fire; his accomplice managed to escape. During the shootout, the car exploded, and the criminal sitting in it died. At the same time, as the city police department clarified, something exploded in the car several times. The police assumed that the militants were transporting ammunition. A police officer and a passerby who found herself in the line of fire also died.
In Khasavyurt and the surrounding area yesterday evening, an operation was launched to search for a bandit who had escaped from the battlefield and possible accomplices of the militants. At the entrances to cities, all vehicles were thoroughly inspected, and reinforced squads appeared on the streets. However, no one else was found.
An attack on security forces occurred yesterday in Ingushetia. At about 17.30 yesterday on the Caucasus highway at the exit from the Vainakh cafe, located on the road leading to the village of Gazi-Yurt, Nazran district, unknown persons shot at the car into which FSB central office officer Alikhan Kalimatov was getting into (he died on the spot) and local operative Beslan Ozdoev (was wounded and taken to the hospital). According to the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs, Alikhan Kalimatov is the brother of the former prosecutor of Ingushetia Makhmud-Ali Kalimatov. According to preliminary data, he was sent to Ingushetia and North Ossetia as part of an investigative team to investigate cases of abduction of persons of Ingush nationality in North Ossetia. The criminals who fired at the car fled.