In Dagestan, a helicopter of internal troops was shot down

A helicopter of internal troops, carrying out a reconnaissance raid, was fired upon by militants last Friday in the Karabudakhkent region of Dagestan. The crew had to land the car, which had received several bullet holes, but there were no casualties.

The incident occurred near the village of Gubden. The crew members reported to the operational headquarters that they were observing about a dozen armed people. Apparently, a source in law enforcement agencies told Kommersant, it was a group put together from the remnants of three gangs, to which the security forces had recently inflicted significant damage. The helicopter, shot down by militants, was carrying out a reconnaissance flight as part of search activities organized by security forces after a suicide bombing carried out on March 6 by a suicide bomber on the territory of a checkpoint at the entrance to the regional center of Karabudakhkent. Then five policemen were killed and two more were injured.

After the discovery of the bandit group, additional forces from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB were deployed to the area. However, even before they were able to block the area where the militants were supposed to be located, they managed to escape.

Meanwhile, new details about the identity of the suicide bomber became known. She turned out to be a resident of Makhachkala, Aminat Ibragimova. She was married to a 23-year-old militant of the Gubden sabotage and terrorist group, Zaur Zagirov, a former employee of the patrol service who collaborated with the Caspian bandit group and joined it in August last year, after the security forces detained several members of the group, and Zagirov himself was imprisoned on the verge of exposure. On the night of February 11, he was killed during a special operation in the village of Gurbuki, Karabudakhkent region. In the same operation, the leader of the Dagestan militants, the so-called valiy (ruler) of the “Vilayata Dagestan” and the commander of the Dagestan front of the Caucasus Emirate banned in Russia, Ibragimkhalil Daudov, was destroyed. According to the investigation, it was the 51-year-old “amir” who planned the terrorist attacks on New Year’s Eve 2011 in Moscow (they did not take place due to the accidental self-detonation of his wife Zavzhat’s bomb).

As a source in the law enforcement agencies of Dagestan told Kommersant, Aminat Ibragimova, a 25-year-old native of the village of Goor, Shamilsky district of the republic, recently lived in Makhachkala with her mother. Her brother Hasanbek was an accomplice of the Makhachkala bandit group, and in December he began to help the Caspian group and was eventually detained by security forces.

According to security officials, before her marriage, Ibragimova lived with her mother, without a father, in the Separatorny village of the capital of Dagestan. As a source in law enforcement agencies told Kommersant, she came under the influence of the sister of the Emir of the Caspian bandit group Murad Shakhshaev, who was liquidated in October 2010, Eleonora (having converted to Islam, she took the name Fatima). According to the source, while gathering young Muslim women, Fatima held “educational” conversations with them, assigning one girl after another to marry the militants. It was she who “married” Aminat Ibragimova to Zaur Zagirov without her mother’s knowledge - before marriage, as often happens among militants, the future husband and wife had never seen each other. Ibragimova spent the month that passed between her marriage and the liquidation of Zagirov in the village of Gurbuki, and on February 10 she left home. Since then, she has been under the tutelage of her murdered husband’s accomplices—part of the time she has been in the forest, sometimes spending the night in rural houses with accomplices of Gubden militants. It was there, the operatives are sure, that the young woman was prepared for self-detonation, having processed her psychologically. The main arguments for the future suicide bomber were the death of her husband and health problems - Ibragimova could not have children.

Last week, members of the Dagestan gang underground committed two more high-profile murders. In Kaspiysk, the district police officer, Major Khusen Usuev, was killed at his workplace. Three militants, whose faces were hidden by masks, burst into a police stronghold on Sovetskaya Street and shot a policeman, also wounding his visitor, Makhachkala resident Rustam Asadullaev, who later died in hospital.

And in Izberbash, the director of the medical school, Magomedrasul Gogurchunov, was killed. According to operatives, Ibragimkhalil Daudov sent him a flash drive demanding that he pay tribute “for jihad.” Mr. Gogurchunov, who was also successfully engaged in business, refused to pay the militants the 5 million rubles they demanded. After the liquidation of Daudov, a similar demand came from the leader of the Izberbash bandit group, Magomed Abdusalamov. The teacher's refusal to comply with this demand cost him his life. According to a Kommersant source, militants have recently imposed tribute on many businessmen in Izberbash and Kaspiysk, threatening them with reprisals if they refuse to comply with their demands.

Yulia Rybina, Makhachkala

The militants landed the scouts