Russian Fighting Foments Fears

Russian security forces in an armored personnel carrier smashed through the wall of a store to rescue two hostages held by suspected Islamic militants Friday as authorities tried to clear out the last pockets of rebel resistance after more than a day of fighting that killed at least 108 people.

Chechen rebels claimed involvement in the near-simultaneous attacks on police and security facilities that began Thursday in this southern Russian city of 235,000 people and left corpses lying on the streets.

The fighting in the Kabardino-Balkariya republic near Chechnya raised fears that Islamic militants who have been fighting Russian forces for most of the past decade were opening a new front in the troubled Caucasus region.

President Vladimir Putin praised the response by the security forces but lamented that such attacks can occur, news agencies quoted him as saying.

"It is bad that such bandit raids are still possible here," Putin said, according to the news agency Interfax, in his first public comments on the fighting.

He added, however, "it's good that this time all the law-enforcement agencies worked in coordination, effectively and tough."

Putin has been beleaguered by attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians and underscored his failure to bring the turbulent Caucasus under control. On Thursday, he ordered a total blockade of Nalchik to prevent militants from slipping out and ordered security forces to shoot any armed resisters.

Putin indicated the central government will continue taking an uncompromising line in the region.

"Our actions must be adequate for all the threats that bandits make to our country. We will act hard and consistently, as we did in this case."

Militants battling Russian forces in the region near Chechnya have employed terrorist methods including suicide bombings and the seizure of more than 1,000 hostages last year in a school in Beslan, about 60 miles southeast of Nalchik.

In freeing the two hostages Friday in the center of Nalchik, soldiers shot grenades through a barred window of a store. Three militants were killed, Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov said.

By midday, the head of the regional government, Gennady Gubin, announced that all rebel resistance had been suppressed and all captives had been freed, the Interfax news agency reported.

Interfax reported later that 12 militants had been killed in the local office of the Russian prison administration, according to deputy administration chief Valery Krayev. Nine hostages were freed from the building earlier Friday, leaving two behind, it said. The two remaining hostages' fate was not known.

It was unclear whether the militants had any specific demands. The rebels' strategy has been to sow instability across the south, capitalizing on the turbulent Caucasus Mountain region's grinding poverty to swell their recruits, buying off corrupt officials to get weapons, and unleashing terrorist bombings and hit-and-run attacks against police.

The president of Kabardino-Balkariya, Arsen Kanokov, told Interfax that nearly 150 militants were involved in the attack and most of them were local residents. He said the main reason for the attack was the republic's difficult economic situation.

"The population's low income and unemployment create the soil for religious extremists and other destructive forces to conduct an ideological war against us," Kanokov was quoted as saying.

At least 108 people, including 72 attackers, had been killed in the fighting, according to a tally by officials, news reports and an Associated Press reporter.

Among them were 24 law enforcement officers and 12 civilians, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev told the RIA-Novosti news agency.

It was unclear whether any of the 12 rebels reported killed at the prison administration building had been included in the toll.

"All points of rebel resistance have been suppressed and hostages freed. Now the security forces are conducting a sweep of the city to find rebels who are hiding," Interfax quoted Gubin, the prime minister of the Kabardino-Balkariya republic, as saying.

Zaur Makhsiyev, who said his 20-year-old sister, Leyla, had been inside the gift shop, said she was uninjured but suffering the aftereffects of an unspecified gas presumably used to incapacitate the militants. The use of gas could not be independently confirmed.

Kolesnikov also said five police officers had been freed from a precinct station where they had been held by militants, and that eight militants had been killed there.

Outside Nalchik, in the suburb of Khasanya, rebels shelled a police car Friday morning, killing two riot police officers.

Bloodied corpses still lay in the streets on Friday. One was near the entrance to police station No. 2 and the regional anti-terrorist center, where most of the windows had been blown out and even tramway lines outside had been brought down.

Seven more bodies were sprawled across the street, most with horrific head wounds. Heavily armed police poked and kicked at the bodies, presumably those of militants, all clad in tracksuits and running shoes.

Outside the local Federal Security Service building, several heavily armed officers picked gingerly through a black backpack that had apparently belonged to a militant, pulling out a candy bar, a bottle of water and a black T-shirt.

ITAR-Tass said that some rebels tried to escape in a van but crashed into a tree and were surrounded and killed. RIA-Novosti said there had been seven militants and an unknown number of hostages in the vehicle. The hostages were rescued, it said.

Estimates of the number of militants involved ranged from 60 to 300, and Interfax quoted an aide to the president of Kabardino-Balkariya as saying late Thursday that 17 had been detained.

Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Chekalin said the fighting began after police tried to capture about 10 militants in a Nalchik suburb, and that the attacks were aimed at diverting police. All 10 suspects were killed, he said.