14 June 2004 10:50
Chechyna police chief says plans to run for president
VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia Chechnya's top police official said yesterday the he wouldn't ignore public appeals to
run in this fall's presidential election, but he stopped short of declaring his candidacy for the wartorn
region's top post.
Allies of the late President Akhmad Kadyrov, killed in a bombing last month, and Kadyrov's powerful son, Ramzan,
have informally said that Alu Alkhanov is their choice, and yesterday Russia's state-run television broadcast a
glowing interview with Alkhanov that appeared to signal Kremlin support.
"If the people who supported Kadyrov from the very beginning of the anti-terrorist operation, and also if the
Chechen people believe that to continue this important task, I must become president then I - as the son of my people -
must take into consideration their views," Alkhanov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Russia's state-run Rossiya television reported earlier yesterday that Alkhanov had already decided to run, but
Alkhanov told Interfax that he hadn't yet made "a final decision" about the August 29 election.
Alkhanov, 47, opposed Chechnya's fight for independence in the mid-1990s. He had been chief of the transport
police in the Moscow-installed Chechen government since 2000 before being named interior minister in April 2003.
The deadline to register for the presidential race is this evening. The most prominent of the seven candidates to
enter so far is Moscow-based Chechen businessman Malik Saidullayev, who was shut out of the election last fall won by
Kadyrov. That election was widely criticized as a sham, with observers citing inflated vote counts and the difficulty of
holding an election amid fighting.
In the last 24 hours, six Russian soldiers were killed and eight wounded in rebel attacks and land mine explosions,
an official in the Moscow-backed Chechen administration said yesterday.
In the capital Grozny, police found and defused two homemade bombs planted in the basement of a school after a
tip-off from local residents, said Ilya Shabalkin, a spokesman for the Russian military operation in Chechnya, according
to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
Meanwhile, police carried out a sweep operation at a refugee village in neighboring Ingushetia on Saturday. Copyright
2004 Taiwan News
[Taiwan News] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
