News

Before her meeting with the Abkhazian leadership, Heidi Tagliavini met with new Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili. He expressed readiness to continue the dialogue with Abkhazia, she said.

The Krasnodar Territorial Court declared admissible an appeal against the decision by the Anapa City Court on the deportation of two Turks-Meskhetians from the Russian Federation.

For the first time, Soma Radio, Sukhum, has launched a series of programs devoted to social issues. The project is being implemented with the help of the British NGO Conciliation Resources.

They were arrested last week in the suburbs of Lyons, France.

Some 20 refugees from Abkhazia seized the building of Tbilisi's sanitary service on the nights of January 12-13. The refugees said they would stay inside the building until Georgia's authorities helped them return to Abkhazia.

The Stavropol police have freed a 14-year-old kidnapped girl, whom the bandits have been holding locked up for fourteen days. A source at the Information Office of the Stavropol Territorial Interior Department informed that the bandits had wanted to get a ransom of half a million rubles for her release.

The new Chechen parliament will consist of two chambers: the Council of the Republic and the National Assembly; each will have 61 deputies.

Vladimir Kazimirov notes in his article that despite the fact that a long-standing standstill in the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have been explained by the inconvenience of the pre-election climate in Armenia and Azerbaijan for the last years, no ray of hope can be seen after the elections too.

On December 1, 2003, Ilgar Ibragimoglu was summoned to the Prosecutor General's Office to give evidence in connection with the October events, there he was arrested as a person suspected of organization of mass riots and offering resistance to the police.

"We declare for the good-neighbor relations with Georgia, when the parties are equal in rights, and we would like the new Georgian authorities to understand it," said Nugzar Ashuba.

"An operative-investigative group is working at the scene of the incident. The main version is negligence when handling weapons. The territory is highly protected, therefore the version concerning the terrorist attack is of small possibility," head of the information department of the republican Interior Ministry Ruslan Atsayev said. The investigation considers all versions of the incident, the Chechen Prosecutor's Office announced.

Without giving any comments, the Azerbaijan Embassy in Tbilisi refused to grant the Armenian officers the visas to take part in the conference forestalling NATO's military exercises that are to take place in Baku.

"Yesterday's conclusion of the bombing trial in Moscow left us with feelings of profound dismay and frustration. We believe that justice has not been served, but the continued cover-up of a heinous crime has reached a new horrific proportion," reads the statement of Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, daughters of a woman killed in the 1999 apartment bombings.

Disbelief, a documentary directed by Andrey Nekrasov of Russia, will be presented at the international Sundance Film Festival, Utah, the U.S. This festival is one of the main independent film forums in the world. Disbelief is devoted to the explosions of apartment houses in Moscow in the autumn of 1999.

A source at the UN office in Tbilisi reported that this package of new proposals was to be handed in to Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in Georgia Heidi Tagliavini during her visit to Sukhum on January 12.

"Nobody in Adjaria is persecuted by political motives. The Interior Ministry will always act within the limits of the law, regardless of who violates the law," declared the Adjarian Interior Minister during a specially convoked briefing.

The appeal reads: "There can be only one explanation why the West is making such efforts to discredit the Chechen Resistance and is untiring in its attempts to link it with "international terrorism" - the Western politicians and state leaders are seeking a pretext for not interfering in the genocide of the Chechen people which is being carried out by Putin's criminal clique before the whole civilized world. Everything is happening as in the Chechen proverb: "Before gobbling her cub baby bear, the she-bear dragged it through the mud.""

An unauthorized search was conducted in the office of the Institute of Political Culture "Lamast" in Ingushetia at about 6 a.m. today.

A fire happened in the tent camp of Chechen refugees "Satsita" in the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya on January 10. A tent for ten people, which the Batiyev family having many children lived in, was completely burnt down as a result of it. Six people who were in the tent when the fire started had time to run out.

A resident of the Roshni-Chu village Amagov was detained in his house by Russian servicemen on December 28, 2003.