AP News, December 27th, 2007
Two Russian officers were convicted by a military court Thursday of killing three construction workers at checkpoint in Chechnya.
One of the officers, Lt. Yevgeny Khudyakov, failed to show up for the verdict in Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia. The court said police would soon start a nationwide search for him.
Khudyakov was sentenced to 17 years in prison and Lt. Sergei Arakcheyev to 15 years for the January 2003 killings. Both officers, of the Russian Interior Troops, were stripped of their ranks.
According to court papers, Khudyakov and Arakcheyev were manning a checkpoint outside the Chechen provincial capital of Grozny when they forced the victims out of their truck, ordered them to lie on the ground and shot them dead. The bodies were doused in fuel and set on fire, prosecutors say.
Both officers denied the charges.
They had been acquitted twice for lack of evidence by civilian juries. But the case was sent to the military court after the Supreme Court's military branch annulled the verdicts at the request of Chechnya's Moscow-backed provincial government.
Few Russian troops or Chechen security officers have been prosecuted for what human rights groups say have been widespread abuses — including abductions, extra-judicial killings, torture and rape. The mainly Muslim region in southern Russia has been devastated by two separatist wars in the past 13 years.
In one of the rare successful prosecutions, a Russian military officer, Col. Yuri Budanov, was convicted by a court in southern Russia in July 2003 of kidnapping and murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman.
Major fighting has died down in Chechnya years ago, but small group of rebels still mount regular raids on federal forces and local authorities.
On Thursday, unidentified gunmen shot and killed a local police officer in Grozny, the regional branch of Russia's Interior Ministry said. The assailants fled.
Nearby provinces in Russia's volatile North Caucasus have also been destabilized by frequent violence, some of it stemming from feuds between criminal gangs, some spilling over from Chechnya.
In the province of Ingushetia which borders Chechnya to the west, several militants ambushed a border guards' vehicle Thursday, killing two officers and wounding two other servicemen, the Interior Ministry branch for Ingushetia said in a statement.
