Russian Soldiers Said Involved in Up to 300 Chechen Kidnappings

"Yes, there are crimes, there are kidnappings, and some of them involve servicemen," Chechen Prime Minister Anatoly Popov told a Moscow news conference, citing statistics from a report by Chechen Prosecutor Vladimir Kravchenko. "This is not a classified report, but the results of the prosecutor's work in 2002. In fact, it indicated about 300 abductions of residents in which soldiers might have been involved. I see nothing extraordinary about that."

There were more than 200 additional kidnappings in which soldiers are not suspected, he said. Vyacheslav Izmailov, a military correspondent with the Novaya Gazeta newspaper and one of Russia's top experts on Chechnya, decried Popov's statement linking abductions to federal forces.

It is "commendable" that Popov made the figures public "but the way he commented on it is totally inexplicable," Izmailov said in an interview. "The practice of kidnapping people by federal servicemen

People have been disappearing mostly at the hands of special death squads, Izmailov said.

"The job of these squads was to secretly take out rebels and those who were known to have been helping them," he said. "They kidnapped to kill, not to get money, acting on tips and secret intelligence provided by informers. If there were rebels whom it would be hard to put on trial for lack of evidence but who were known to have committed crimes, these people would be the most likely victims of such squads. But in any case, whatever the reason, even the lowest estimate of 300 makes one's hair stand on end. It is a horrible figure and it is a horrible phenomenon."

The New York-based Human Rights Watch reported last week that according to unpublished Russian government statistics, 1,132 civilians were killed in Chechnya during 2002, which it said was about five to eight times the homicide rate in Russia as a whole.

Chechens exercised a degree of autonomy after defeating Russian troops in a 1994-96 war. Russian forces returned in 1999 and have battled guerrillas since.

Kravchenko, the prosecutor who prepared the report, said in a telephone interview that "the information about the 300 abductions has been made public because we have decided to do so."