Russian authorities have blown up the house where rebel Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov was killed last week in a special operation, witnesses and officials said on Monday.
It was unclear whether the explosion on Sunday was meant as punishment for the family that allegedly gave him shelter, a safety precaution or an attempt to cover up sensitive evidence.
Colonel General Arkady Yedelev, chief of the federal headquarters for the campaign in Chechnya, said the authorities had demolished the house out of fear it could contain booby traps.
He said that demolition experts had discovered and detonated a box found in the basement of the house that contained documents and was ridden with explosives.
”The team of investigators decided to blow up the entire house to avoid such surprises in the future,” Yedelev said in a statement, according to his office.
A spokesperson for the headquarters of Russia’s military campaign in Chechnya and the surrounding region said he could not confirm the house had been blown up.
Russian authorities said last Tuesday that Maskhadov was killed during an operation by Russian forces earlier that day in a bunker under the house where he had been hiding, though accounts of how he died have varied.
A woman who said she and her family had lived in the house for 27 years denied last week that Maskhadov had been there.
Meanwhile, Russian rights activists joined Maskhadov’s family in calling on the Russian authorities to return his body for burial.
”Refusing to hand over the body to the relatives of the deceased is a shame,” representatives of three rights groups wrote in a statement cited by the Interfax news agency. They also criticised the security services for killing the rebel instead of capturing him.
”Considering the technical equipment special forces have, Maskhadov could have been captured alive and could have stood trial,” they said.
Grenade attack in Grozny
Also on Monday, gunmen fired grenades at a military commandant’s office in the Chechen capital, Grozny, wounding at least five servicemen, the interior ministry said, but Chechen officials reportedly pinned the shooting on Russian servicemen.
The Interfax Military News Agency cited unnamed Chechen law-enforcement sources as saying that the shooting resulted from careless handling of a grenade launcher by a Russian serviceman.
Twelve servicemen, one police officer and two civilians were injured, it said.
Interior ministry spokesperson Alexei Polyansky, however, described the shooting as an attack on the commandant’s office, which is located in a heavily guarded district of Grozny. He said the gunmen had wounded five servicemen and escaped quickly, possibly by car.
Sergei Kozhemyaka, a duty officer at the southern branch of the Emergency Situation Ministry in Rostov-on-Don, said eight people had been wounded in the attack in Grozny’s Leninsky district, including two women. All eight were hospitalised, he said.
The varying accounts of the incident underlined the fractious nature of law enforcement in Chechnya, where responsibility — and blame — is divided among numerous, often rival Chechen and federal agencies.
Meanwhile, Russian interior ministry troops killed three militants and captured two others who had holed up in a house in the restive southern region of Dagestan on Monday, said Khabib Magomedov of the ministry’s press service. Two servicemen were wounded in the skirmish in the village of Nuradilovo in the Khasavyurt region, close to the Chechen border.
Khabib said one of the dead militants was an Arab.
Later in the day, Dagestani interior ministry spokesperson Abdul Musyaev said federal forces were fighting with militants on the outskirts of Khasavyurt, citing an unnamed police official, reported that police stormed a private home where two militants were holed up.
Russia’s southern provinces have been plagued by violence, some of it spilling over from war-shattered Chechnya. In recent weeks, special military operations increasingly have targeted alleged extremists outside Chechnya. — Sapa-AP