Russia's interior ministry announced Saturday that 62 of its military policemen serving in the breakaway republic of Chechnya had been killed since the beginning of this year, while another 253 had been wounded, Interfax reported.
The death toll is in addition to a disputed number of regular army soldiers and OMON special forces killed in the 21-month conflict or "anti-terrorist operation" as Moscow prefers to call it.
The Commander-in-chief of the interior ministry's forces in the North Caucasus, Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, announced the latest figures at a military conference in Moscow that honoured Russia's dead killed in action.
The interior ministry has lost 815 troops, while five were missing and 2,497 had been wounded since the conflict began in August 1999, Interfax quoted a federal government official in Chechnya as saying.
Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov told the military conference in Moscow on Saturday that the ministry's forces had killed 106 rebel gunmen and arrested 70 others during May.
Federal troops have killed more than 11,000 Chechen fighters over the past 21 months, according to the Russian military command.
But a discrepancy in the official casualty figures issued by the Russian Defence Ministry and Kremlin caused a potentially embarrassing confusion last week within the higher echelons of the Moscow government.
Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters last Monday that 2,682 Russian soldiers in the various military branches had been killed since Chechen rebels staged a series of incursions in neighbouring Dagestan in August 1999.
However, the Kremlin's chief office dealing with the Chechen conflict, run by senior presidential aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky, on May 16 reported that the death toll of Russian soldiers was 3,096.
Moscow launched its military crackdown in the separatist republic on October 1, 1999.
Yastrzhembsky's office later suggested that Ivanov's figures did not include the number (of local pro-Russian) Chechen police officers who had also died in the fighting.
The Russian Soldiers' Mother Committee has repeatedly argued that Moscow is trying to hide its true losses in Chechnya, estimating that the true toll may be three times higher than officials admit – MOSCOW (AFP)
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