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Your support makes all the difference.Chechnya's leading warlord has threatened to carry out far more devastating attacks against Russia than last month's mass hostage seizure in Moscow which ended with almost 200 people dead.
"The next time those who come won't make any demands, won't take any hostages," Shamil Basayev said on Chechen Kavkaz-Tsentr, a website his rebel faction is known to control. "The main goal will be to destroy the enemy and exact maximum damage."
About 50 heavily armed and explosive-laden Chechens seized Moscow's Na Dubrovke theatre and more than 800 hostages on 23 October, threatening to kill them all unless Russian troops withdrew from Chechnya within a week. Security forces stormed the building after three days, shooting dead the Chechens but also killing at least 120 of the hostages with what experts say was "a huge overdose" of Fentanyl gas, an opiate-based agent, significantly more powerful than morphine and heroin.
In his web statement, Mr Basayev took responsibility for the theatre raid and said he planned it "without the knowledge" of Chechnya's elected leader, Aslan Maskhadov.
But a Kremlin spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhemsky, on Thursday played scratchy recordings of phone intercepts which he said proved the Moscow hostage-taking had been endorsed by Mr Maskhadov. He could no longer be considered a "legitimate representative" of the Chechen people, Mr Yastrzhemsky said: "We have to wipe out the commanders of this movement."
Russia is also seeking to extradite Akhmed Zakayev, a senior aide to Mr Maskhadov, who was arrested last week by Danish police while he was attending a conference on Chechnya in Copenhagen. In the past week Moscow has cracked down hard. "Chechens are being persecuted all across Russia," said Aslambek Aslakhanov, a Chechen deputy of the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament. "They are being punished just for being Chechens."
The Duma blocked a call for an independent commission to investigate the causes of so many unintentional deaths among the hostages. It also voted for new restrictions on reporting anti-terrorist operations, including the three-year old war in Chechnya. "The terrorists were able to manipulate Russian media, and that shouldn't happen again," said a press minister, Mikhail Lesin.
The Duma also voted unanimously against returning to the families the remains of 41 Chechens killed in the siege, and recommended they be buried in unmarked graves.
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