At first, the statement seemed to fit a recent pattern of pressure on humanitarian aid groups. In Moscow, Russian officials have shut down foreign-financed humanitarian aid organizations like the United States Agency for International Development and Unicef.
But aid groups active in the Ingushetia region in southern Russia, where the 20 nongovernmental organizations are said to be located, said not one had been closed in recent months, for any reason. The disconnect, they said, illustrates the eerie way the security agency, a successor to the K.G.B., sometimes operates.
Tanya Lokshina, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview from Paris that the statement was meant to create "a climate of suspicion and a spy mania in the region” that could foreshadow real action against those working or traveling there.
Earlier this month, Ms. Lokshina said, she received threatening messages on her cellphone after planning a research trip to Dagestan, another of Russia’s seven predominantly Muslim regions in the North Caucasus.
Alarmed about the announced closings, directors of aid groups in Ingushetia called one another Saturday to determine which had been closed.
"Nobody knows which organizations were referred to,” Timur Akiyev, director of a local office of the human rights group Memorial, said by telephone. "All organizations are working, none have been closed.”
Yuri Sheryshev, director of the Ingushetia department of the security agency, did not name the groups said to have been shuttered. "It would be naïve to think that foreign organizations allot large sums of money to nongovernmental organizations for democracy development,” he told the Interfax news agency. "By declaring some high goals of their work, they in fact collect intelligence for foreign states.”
Many aid groups have for years focused on Russian regions in the Caucasus, which includes Chechnya, where a civil war that began in 1994 still simmers today.
Russian authorities have bristled at such aid as an affront to national pride.
