News

The All-Georgian Association for the Defense of Human Rights expressed a protest against the visit of former president of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev to Tbilisi designed for April 9. The organization demanded that the Georgian law-enforcement agencies arrested him.

The military assert that the killed bodyguard of Basayev, Abubakar Visimbayev, was directly connected with the terrorist act in the Theatre Center "Nord-Ost" in Moscow.

Speaker Murtuz Alekserov said the border opening could deal a serious blow to the relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey.

"Asanidze is not a politician or important figure, but he is still being held in prison in defiance of all judicial norms and procedures. We will not allow that a man be illegally held in custody in a Georgian region," the Georgian President said to journalists.

On April 7, the Promishlenny District Court of Stavropol was to consider a complaint by the chairman of the interregional youth public charitable organization Caucasian Youth Human Rights League, Maksim Abrakhimov, against an illegal decision by the Department of the Russian Ministry of Justice in Stavropol Territory.

"I can assert with all due responsibility that no one in the federal center or the Chechen administration will negotiate with Maskhadov," Akhmat Kadyrov said.

Armenian law-enforcement agencies have been arresting opposition activists for several days already. Thus, the National Unity party reports on 127 arrested party members and activists.

"If the culprits, several of them being known, are not punished and the damage to the media is not compensated, we will have to state that Armenian authorities are not interested in consolidating the basic democratic values in the country," reads the statement by a number of Armenian non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The women and children who were in the bus were let go, and about 50 men were made get out and were conveyed to the town of Ochamchira.

"If investigations do not lead to criminal charges against those responsible for this crime, a negative signal will be sent to Europe that in Armenia attacks on dissident voices go unpunished," reads the letter by the international human rights organization.

"This terrorist act was prepared by the forces that want the bloody conflict in the North Caucasus to be continued and expanded," reads the statement by the Board of the International Society Memorial.

Special operations units of the federal forces and the Vostok battalion under the command of Sulim Yamadayev are conducting an operation to detain separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov in the southern part of Chechnya.

The party's statement was issued at the April 6 press conference. It is addressed to ambassadors of the Council of Europe's Member States as well as to the US ambassador in order to inform them of the mass detentions of opposition activists.

The Governor of Montana, Judy Martz, said it was necessary to commemorate the 89th anniversary of the genocide since it will play a great role in the cause of ruling out a chance for such crimes to be repeated.

The peculiarity of the action was the increase in the number of its participants due to members of the youth movement Yabloko and supporters of the Democratic Russia party, reorganized on the initiative of Yuli Ribakov.

Recent researches display that in spite of assurances by the Russian leadership about stabilization of the situation in Chechnya, mass human rights violations, such as torture, forcible disappearances and extrajudicial executions are going on there.

Law enforcement officers discovered a repeater that militants used to broadcast their speeches on television.

A bomb exploded on April 6 in Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, in a compound occupied by Russian military officers. General Alexander Studenikin, head of the Russian Central Command in the Transcaucasia, was injured in the blast.

Militant leaders' messenger has surrendered to the law enforcement bodies in Chechnya, reported the joint press center of the Regional Headquarters on the Counter-terrorist Operation in the North Caucasus.

People's Artist of Azerbaijan Flora Kerimova is an activist of the opposition Musavat party. That is why she has been denied access to both state and private TV channels in Azerbaijan for over a year.