From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 6/27/2007 8:38 PM
June 28, 2007
Russian Freed From Guantánamo Is Killed by Police Near Chechnya
By C. J. CHIVERS
MOSCOW, June 27 — A Russian man who had been captured by American forces in Afghanistan and released from the detention center at Guantánamo Bay was killed Wednesday in a police raid near Chechnya, Russia’s intelligence service said.
The man, Ruslan Odizhev, was released by the United States in early 2004, and returned to Russia on the condition that he and six other repatriated Russian detainees would be tried in Russian courts.
Russia did not honor the agreement, however, and the men were freed. Mr. Odizhev had been missing and presumed to be living in hiding since 2005.
He died Wednesday in an apartment building in Nalchik, a city of 275,000 and the capital of the internal republic Kabardino-Balkariya, according to the F.S.B., the principal successor to the Soviet K.G.B.
The F.S.B. said that Mr. Odizhev and another man suspected of being a militant had died in a gun battle. Explosives were found with his body, the F.S.B. said.
The news of Mr. Odizhev’s killing raised questions about the handling of his release, and the possible repatriation of other Guantánamo detainees, which the United States has said it hopes to do.
Three of the Russian men released with Mr. Odizhev have since been arrested, and the other three have apparently fled Russia because of police harassment or torture, according to Human Rights Watch, a private American organization, which has investigated their cases.
The authorities said that Mr. Odizhev had returned home and entered the Islamic insurgency in the North Caucasus, the region where instability has spread with the second Chechen war, which began in 1999.
Kabardino-Balkariya was briefly besieged in late 2005 by frustrated young men and Islamic militants. The attack, the last major offensive by militants tied to the Chechen war, began with bold day raids but ended with Russian counterattacks trapping and killing the militants by the score.
The F.S.B. said Wednesday that Mr. Odizhev had been a spiritual leader in Yarmuk, the group that led the attack. That could not be confirmed.
Carroll Bogert, the associate director of Human Rights Watch, said Mr. Odizhev’s interactions with the police dated to at least 2000, when Russian authorities accused him of involvement in bombings in 1999.
Ms. Bogert said that Mr. Odizhev had been tortured so severely that he fled Russia, apparently for Afghanistan, where he was captured by American forces in 2001. The circumstances of his capture and his relations to the Taliban are not fully known, she said.
Upon his release from Guantánamo Bay in February 2004, Mr. Odizhev was held and interrogated by the police, she said. He was released in June of that year, but denied an internal passport, which would have allowed him to work legally.
His activities since have not been publicly known.
The authorities said Wednesday that Mr. Odizhev had been on the federal wanted list in connection with the 1999 bombings. That complicated the case, raising the question of why he was released in 2004.
The Interior Ministry for the republic declined to comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/world/europe/28russia.html?ex=1183608000&en=a808488931fbdf3c&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERNEWS
