28 June 2008, 19:21
Three persons killed in special operation in Dagestan
At night on June 28, in the vicinity of a 9-storey apartment house in the Akushinskiy Avenue in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, the regime of counterterrorist operation was introduced. According to law enforcement bodies, militants were blocked in one of the apartments.
In the course of this special operation, three persons who were in the blocked apartment were killed: Rashid Gazilaliev, born in 1979, his wife Sevda Abdulaeva and a young man Shamil by name.
According to a source of the "Interfax" at the FSB Department for Dagestan, Gazilaliev and the persons who were in the apartment with him were suspected of complicity to members of illegal armed formations; in the course of the special operation, they opened fire from sub-machine guns at the special troops fighters, and then shot each other dead, having understood the hopelessness of their situation.
Meanwhile, according to Gajimurat Kamalov, director of the Dagestan publishing house named "Freedom of Speech", the murdered Rashid Gazilaliev was a peaceful resident and had nothing to do with the armed underground; he was well-known and respected in the city and worked as assistant teacher at the foreign languages department of the Dagestan Pedagogical University and "did not even know how to approach weapons."
According to Mr Kamalov's version, Gazilaliev refused to open the door to employees of law enforcement bodies because everybody in Dagestan is afraid of militiamen who hold illegal searches in houses; by his disobedience he provoked militiamen's fire.
