Russian officials in Chechnya said Sunday the bodies of several civilians have been discovered in a mass grave on the outskirts of Grozny, but denied reports that up to 200 remains had been unearthed in the pit.
"There are at least 11 (bodies), but we cannot be more precise because we think the bodies are mined so we are approaching this slowly," a Russian prosecutor's office official in Chechnya told AFP by telephone.
The Interfax news agency earlier reported that at least three bodies have already been identified, including that of a 16-year-old boy who according to the report went missing in December last year.
Chechen sources were not available for comment Sunday, but rebel administration officials alleged Saturday that the victims were Chechen civilians who were rounded up and shot by the Russian troops.
Separately, the Kremlin confirmed Sunday that President Vladimir Putin's human rights envoy Vladimir Kalamanov would travel to Chechnya this week to check on newspaper reports that Russian soldiers were keeping civilians as prisoners in an earth pit.
Kalamanov's office said it had no proof that the Novaya Gazeta report was true but still launch a fact-finding mission.
The newspaper's reporter was briefly detained in Chechnya by Russian soldiers while covering the story before being released following a media uproar in Moscow.
The mass grave was discovered on the southeastern outskirts of Grozny near the Russian military headquarters stationed in the suburb of Khankala.
Initial Russian news agency reports on Saturday said the bodies were those of Chechen fighters killed when Russian troops took the city in February 2000.
Later reports said the dead appeared to have been killed at different dates. They said the grave initially came to light when local people dug up some bodies early last week.
"The people were killed at different periods; the bodies frozen in a semi-decomposed state were discovered in a pile," said the Russian military statement, citing preliminary autopsies.
Russian military officials on Sunday, however, insisted that all the dead were victims of Chechen fighters.
"They were killed by rebels at different times," Vsevolod Chernov of the Russian administration in Chechnya told Interfax.
Chechen officials said that local people had suspected the existence of the grave for some time but had not dared go there because it was less than a kilometer (a mile) from the Russian Khankala military base.
Chechen rebels abandoned the defense of Grozny in February last year after seven weeks of bloody clashes in which 368 Russian soldiers were killed and another 1,469 wounded.
The Russian military at the time said they had killed some 1,500 Chechen fighters as they tried to leave the city.
Russia's human rights record in Chechnya has drawn concern from Western officials, and the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, is to visit Chechnya next week to assess the current situation there – MOSCOW (AFP)
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