Putin talks tough as rebels rooted out
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-14 22:06

Russia's Vladimir Putin told rebel insurgents on Friday they could expect no mercy in future after his forces said they killed scores of gunmen who launched an audacious raid on a town in the Caucasus.

Speaking after ministers gave him an official report on Thursday's raid on Nalchik that throws in doubt the Kremlin's control of the mainly Muslim Caucasus region, Putin said security forces had acted "coherently, effectively, toughly."

"Our actions must be commensurate with all the threats that bandits pose for our country. We will act as toughly and consistently as we did on this occasion," Itar-Tass news agency quoted him as saying.

Russian security forces said on Friday they had all but wiped out the remnants of a small army of rebels, linked to the Chechnya independence cause, who launched coordinated attacks on police, state security and other strategic buildings.

What was believed to be the last rebel resistance, a small group of fighters holed up in a prison administration building, had been wiped out by security forces by Friday afternoon.

"We have found so far 9 bodies of rebels but we may find some more elsewhere in the building," a colonel, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters at the scene.

Police said they were now focusing on hunting down any gunmen who may have ditched their arms and tried to sneak out of the city, set in the foothills of the towering Mount Elbrus, by melting into the local population.

Separatists from nearby Chechnya, who have been fighting against Moscow rule for a decade, said they staged the raid with support from local anti-Kremlin insurgents.

72 FIGHTERS KILLED'

In his report to Putin delivered in the Kremlin, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said altogether 72 fighters had been killed and 31 detained. The raiding party numbered about 100, Russian officials have said.

He said 24 police officers and 12 civilians in the town had also been killed. The rebels themselves contradicted these figures through their Web sites, putting their dead at 11 with four fighters missing.

Putin, who came to power in 2000 by talking tough on Chechnya, told his security forces on Thursday to kill any gunmen who resisted.

But commentators said the scale and brazen nature of the attacks in daylight by a force that brought together Chechen separatists and a mixed bag of anti-Kremlin Muslim insurgents contradicted the official line that Moscow was in control of the turbulent Caucasus.

"The events in Nalchik demonstrated with new, shocking force the fragility of what the authorities ... have been calling 'peace'," Izvestia newspaper said in an editorial. "We have to admit: there is a war going on in the Caucasus."

Sporadic gunfire that could be heard on Thursday had died down in Nalchik, a grid of dusty tree-lined streets with ramshackle single-storey houses.

The authorities' rapid response to the crisis was in contrast to last year's deadly attack by Chechen militants on a school in the town of Beslan, when the Russian leader was widely criticized for staying silent for too long.

But it remained unclear whether it would deflect public criticism over another failure by security services to prevent a rebel assault in the region.