Russian officials denied Wednesday that troops had carried out a "cleansing" operation in a town in war-torn Chechnya where a dozen people were reported to have been murdered recently.
Between 10 and 16 people were killed by unidentified armed men in their homes overnight Sunday in the southwestern locality of Urus-Martan, ITAR-TASS news agency cited local residents as saying.
"An operation is underway in Urus-Martan to uncover fighters. But there is no fighting, no 'cleansing' operations in homes, no victims," the office of the Kremlin spokesman on Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, told the agency.
Sources in the pro-Russian administration in Chechnya however told ITAR-TASS. "There were definitely clashes in the town. It may have been a dispute between local clans."
A former fiefdom of radical Islamic Wahhabites, the town was also a base for notorious kidnapping gangs that took hundreds of hostages in the chaos after Chechnya won de facto independence during the last 1994-96 war.
Russian troops poured into the breakaway republic on October 1, 1999, in a self-declared "anti-terrorist" operation that has been heavily criticized for its human rights abuses.
Urus-Martan, located 25 kilometers (16 miles) south-west of the capital Grozny, remained closed for the second day Wednesday. Only authorized vehicles were being permitted to pass checkpoints to the town -- MOSCOW (AFP)
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