Postmedia News
Published: Saturday, November 27, 2010New allegations that a blundering Russian death squad murdered six Red Cross workers in war-torn Chechnya in 1996 -- including a Canadian nurse -- have prompted the Geneva-based humanitarian agency to probe the claims with government officials in Moscow.
The nighttime killings of 51-year-old Vancouver nurse Nancy Malloy and five colleagues from Norway, New Zealand, Spain and the Netherlands -- deaths that the International Committee of the Red Cross and the rest of the global humanitarian community condemned at the time as "assassinations" -- remain unsolved.
But the atrocity was widely presumed by expert observers to have been a deliberate act by Chechen insurgents bent on achieving independence from Russia at all costs.
This week, however, a former Russian special forces officer claimed that the massacre 14 years ago at the Red Cross hospital near Grozny was, in fact, carried out by Russian agents -- including himself -- who thought they were raiding a nest of Chechen terrorists rather than an international medical centre protected under terms of a ceasefire.
In an interview published Wednesday in the Times of London, former Russian major Aleksi Potyomkin -- described by the British newspaper as a "defecting" ex-agent of Russia's Federal Security Service, and now hiding in Germany -- confessed that he was part of a secret commando unit that killed the medical workers in a tragic mistake on Dec. 17, 1996.
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