A Russian interior ministry general, a colonel and their driver were wounded late Monday in a Chechen rebel attack, the military said on Tuesday.
The ambush took place in Gudermes, the administrative capital in the east of war-torn Chechnya, when pro-independence rebels fighting the Russian army raked the jeep carrying the three men with gunfire.
The office of President Vladimir Putin's spokesman on the conflict, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, named the general as Anatoly Mikh. All three victims were rushed to hospital but their injuries were not said to be life-threatening, it added, cited by Interfax.
A spokesman for breakaway Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov told AFP that separatist forces under the command of field commander Uvays Indarbiyev had attacked a Russian military vehicle in Gudermes.
But the rebel spokesman said he had no information about the occupants of the jeep.
The Russian army, which poured troops into the rebellious republic last October, said Chechen guerrillas had attacked federal positions 15 times in the past 24 hours, including six checkpoints in the capital Grozny.
Military officials told the AVN news agency they had suffered no losses but claimed 15 rebels had died in fighting in the republic.
It was impossible to verify the claim independently.
Russian helicopter gunships and warplanes meanwhile continued to blitz rebel bases concentrated in Chechnya's southern mountains, inflicting "serious losses," army headquarters said.
Despite an 11-month military onslaught to bring the republic to heel, Russian forces continue to bleed men from daily rebel attacks that have sapped soldiers' morale -- MOSCOW (AFP)
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