Night attacks

The militants met the police from an ambush

In Ingushetia and Dagestan over the past 24 hours, militants have carried out a series of daring attacks, as a result of which three policemen were killed and about a dozen more were wounded. As a rule, the bandits acted from an ambush, and the security forces did not have time to resist. In all cases, the attackers themselves were able to escape safely.

As the department of the Investigative Committee for Ingushetia said, on Sunday evening, at about 23.00, on the federal highway "Caucasus" near the village of Yandare, Nazran district, militants attacked a police convoy consisting of a Gazelle and an armored UAZ. In the cars were more than a dozen operatives seconded to the republic from the Murmansk region, who that evening were returning from Nazran to their place of deployment in the Sunzhensky district. The terrorists were waiting for the convoy in the forest - first they fired several shots at it from grenade launchers, and then opened fire on the policemen with machine guns.

As a result, two officers of the Department of Internal Affairs for the Murmansk region were killed - inspector of the juvenile affairs department from Murmansk Edgar Barankov and officer of the Pechenga district police department Nikolai Musatov. In addition, their colleagues Vitaly Fomin, Yuri Kravchuk, Viktor Gorbunov, Oleg Arinin, Roman Elodimov, Sergei Tipko and Alexander Garlov were wounded. All of them were hospitalized with shrapnel wounds and concussions in a military hospital in Vladikavkaz.

As the head of the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Murmansk Region, Vitaly Fedotov, said, their lives are not currently in danger. According to him, if necessary, the Internal Affairs Directorate will take over the organization of the movement of relatives of the victims to the place of treatment of their loved ones. In addition, in addition to the Ingush investigators who are investigating the incident, the regional police department will also conduct its own inspection.

According to a representative of the Republican UPC, the security forces did not have time to react to the sudden attack - it was already dark, and the cars, by inertia, passed the place of the shelling, so the militants managed to escape safely. Investigators who arrived at the scene of the emergency in the morning during their inspection found only a few dozen machine gun cartridges and the casing of a disposable grenade launcher.

Yesterday morning, several more attacks occurred in Dagestan. At about 2.30 in Khasavyurt, militants fired a grenade launcher at the house of the head of the district police department, as a result of which one policeman who was responsible for guarding the house was wounded. Three hours later, not far from the village of Gubden, Karabudakhken district, a UAZ carrying Volgograd riot police was fired upon. The separatists also set up an ambush in a forest area and did not encounter any resistance from the security forces. As the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs said, there were four riot police officers in the car: as a result of the attack, one of them was seriously wounded. And already in the afternoon, at about 16.30, in the same Khasavyurt on Groznenskaya Street, militants fired at another car driven by a canine inspector of the local police department. The policeman died on the spot. As in all other cases, the criminals managed to escape, and the announced “Interception” plan did not bring results.

Sergey MINENKO