Russia Law Enforcement

Shock troops stormed into a Moscow marketplace last month, rounded up all the dark-skinned males and herded them onto a bus, using rubber truncheons to silence anyone who complained. In a raid-and-plunder operation that has now become a routine part of Russia's purported war on organized crime, the despised riot police tossed the produce peddlers onto the floor of the bus.

Shock troops stormed into a Moscow marketplace last month, rounded up all the dark-skinned males and herded them onto a bus, using rubber truncheons to silence anyone who complained. In a raid-and-plunder operation that has now become a routine part of Russia's purported war on organized crime, the despised riot police tossed the produce peddlers onto the floor of the bus.

A woman who accused the Russian security services of a series of 1999 apartment-building bombings that killed hundreds of people has been granted political asylum in the United States. Alyona Morozova, who survived the midnight bombing of her 18-story apartment building in south Moscow but lost her mother and boyfriend, has been notified that her petition claiming fear of persecution if she returns to Russia has been granted, her lawyer said Monday. The decision by U.S.

Suspended Prosecutor General Yuri I. Skuratov, alleging widespread corruption within the Russian government, said Saturday that 780 high-ranking current and former officials are under investigation for improperly trading in lucrative government treasury bills.

Amid growing concern over Russia's political stability, President Boris N. Yeltsin was reduced Monday to holding a summit with China's president in a hospital, where the Kremlin said he is suffering from pneumonia. The Kremlin said Yeltsin was rushed to Moscow's elite Central Clinical Hospital on Sunday with a fever of 102 degrees. He was put on antibiotics and his temperature returned to normal, officials said, but he is likely to remain in the hospital for more than a week.

In a sharp preelection turnabout, the Kremlin-appointed head of Russia's war-torn republic of Chechnya declared Thursday that death squads associated with security forces were seeking to prolong the conflict through abductions and terror. "People continue to go missing in Chechnya. They are taken away in the middle of the night.

They call it "copper fever," and it's destroying Russia's second city. Thieves scavenging for the precious metal have torn up phone lines, nearly crippled the railroad, stopped trolley cars cold and stalled elevators citywide, all for the sake of tiny copper parts. "It's become a nightmarish disaster," said Larisa Medvedeva, dispatcher for the City Emergency Elevator Service. "Every day we get dozens of calls. If before only drunk hooligans broke the elevators, now it's thieves.