News

On March 25, the court of first instance of Yerevan's Arabkir and Kanaker-Zeytun Communes rejected the suit of Artashes Bakhshian, a member of the Armenian State Commission on Protection of Economic Competition, versus the Business Express weekly.

Ramzan Alaudinov was held in a temporary district police department until May 2000. But when the Siberian policemen's assignment was over and they returned to Khanty-Mansiysk, Tamara Tabulayeva lost connection with her son.

David Badjagua, a 25-year-old activist of the Georgian NGO Association of Young Lawyers and Political Scientists, has been released in the zone of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict. Abductors have been holding him on the territory of Abkhazia for two months.

On March 25, a 15-year-old teenager was killed and two teenagers were badly wounded in a missile attack from a military helicopter on the outskirts of the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya, Ingushetia's Sunzha district.

Approximately 20 police officers armed with automatic weapons took part in the search, according to information of the movement.

Azerbaijan President Ilkham Aliyev has denied the existence of the agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia concerning the resolution of the Karabakh conflict that was reached in Paris and Key West in the spring of 2001.

Early in the morning of March 25, a Russian bomb squad was in the village of Gordali, Chechnya's Gudermes district, trying to neutralize a land mine when it suddenly exploded.

One of the leaders of the Azerbaijan Diaspora, retired militia officer Makhir Ilyasov, was killed by a shot to the neck in Krasnoyarsk on the night of March 23-24.

"Russia will strongly object to such attempts, and we count on the support of the majority of Commission Members," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said.

The government of Nagorny Karabakh has passed a resolution on providing free medical care for certain sections of the population.

The Prague meeting of the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan on the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict scheduled for March 29 will not be held.

As a convoy was leaving the village of Samashki, unidentified attackers opened grenade and small arms fire at an UAZ-452 van at the end of the convoy.

A Chechen policeman from Grozny was kidnapped in the village of Urus-Martan on March 24.

"The human rights monitoring in Chechnya must be carried out by an ombudsman in Chechnya. That is why the post of human rights envoy should be introduced there as soon as possible," Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation Vladimir Lukin said at a press conference on March 25.

"Had rebels really managed to take our soldiers prisoners, we would have known there names and other details by now," a source at the military commandant's office said.

On March 24, the parliament of the unrecognized republic of South Osetia passed a resolution on the illegitimacy of the holding of the 28 March elections for the Georgian parliament on the territory of South Osetia.

We call your attention to the declaration made by the Council of Europe's Committee of Ministers on the latest pardoning decree of Azerbaijan President Ilkham Aliyev.

Leaders of some opposition parties held in the Bailovskaya prison, Baku, Azerbaijan, set up 16 October Movement on March 24.

On March 24, special operations units of the Georgian Interior Ministry conducted a special operation in the village of Etseri, in a mountain part of Georgia's Svanetia. Three dangerous gangsters - Gocha, Omekhi and Yevgeny Aprasidze - were liquidated during the operation.

"The militia in the autonomous republic will be disarmed when democracy is built in Georgia," Aslan Abashidze said to the local television early on March 25.