News

New rapporteur on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was appointed at the session of the PACE Political Committee in Paris yesterday. He is David Atkinson, head of the Azerbaijan Delegation to the PACE Samed Seidov told the Caucasian Knot correspondent.

Summing up the debates, Speaker Murtuz Aleskerov said: "We protested against the arrival of servicemen who occupied our lands and shed our people's blood and secured our object."

"In Georgia, the matter always concerned terrorists' living in the Pankissi Gorge, but I've got no information about their number and exact whereabouts," said US Ambassador to Georgia Richard Miles.

The other six mosques are closed at Mayor Berdov's direction because of the difficult situation.

Political scientist Zardusht Alidaze holds NATO's decision to cancel military exercises in Baku can create complications in NATO's relations with Azerbaijan.

"Rebels planned to carry out in a Dagestani town, admittedly Khasavyurt, something similar to what happened in Beslan," a source in the Chechen military commandant's office said.

President Putin announced during today's enlarged session of the Cabinet that higher officials in Russia's regions must be elected by Legislative Assemblies at the president's suggestion.

The Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry is negotiating it with the NATO leadership and the US Embassy to Azerbaijan.

The next meeting of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) is to be held in Paris on September 16.

According to available information, Aminat Nagayeva, who was considered a Shakhid who blown up the Tu-134 plane in August 24, is alive. She stays in Rostov Region and trades at a local market.

"The Abkhazian leadership has information that subversive and terrorist groups are being prepared in Georgia to arrange provocations on the threshold of the presidential election in the country," Vice President of Abkhazia Valery Arshba said.

Such suppositions are caused by several incidents that occurred both in the Prigorodny district itself and on the border with Ingushetia.

Representatives of the Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry negotiated with NATO officials in Brussels and came to the agreement that no more than three Armenian officers would be able to take part in the exercises.

The Former Political Prisoners for Human Rights NGO has reported on 72 cases of using torture against detainees recorded since new authorities came to power in Georgia.

It is not inconceivable that the September 7 attack against Ruslan Zelimkhanov may have been the Russian special services' doing, Chechen human rights activist Mairbek Taramov said. The Kremlin actively uses "Chechens against Chechens" in recent years, he added.

"A coalition of Russian and international human rights organizations united today to condemn in the strongest terms the taking hostage and killing of hundreds of children, parents and teachers by a group of armed men and women in a school in the city of Beslan, North Ossetia in the North Caucasus region of Russia," reads the document.

Meeting participants touched upon questions concerning the resolution of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, Abkhazia's political status, the return of refugees and internally displaced persons, and the honoring of Sochi agreements by the Russian, Georgian and Abkhazian leadership.

"Such repressive actions have a single goal - to block information about human rights abuse coming from Chechnya and Ingushetia," head of the Chechen National Rescue Committee Ruslan Badalov said.

The embassy will guarantee that the Rustavi 2 journalists detained in Beslan will come to an interrogation at the first instance of investigators in case the Russian authorities set them free.

On the night of September 5, a private house was completely destroyed as a result of an explosion in the village of Chechen-Aul. Investigators have established the happening was caused by mortar fire.