Word: raids
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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MOSCOW: Chechen Rebels today released 45 Dagestani hostages taken during the January 9th attack on the village of Kizlyar. The Chechens may still hold as many as 24 Russian policemen captured during the raid in addition to 30 Russian power plant workers who were seized in Grozny last week. Unintimidated by Russian threats to "unconditionally eliminate" Chechen leader Jokar Dudayev, the rebels are holding the remainder of the hostages, demanding that the Russian government release the bodies of fighters killed during the assault. Chechen morale has risen dramatically since the strike into Dagestan, despite Yeltsin's tough talk...
...June 16 presidential elections, though he has yet to declare his candidacy. But even if he staged the event as a political-image make-over, Yeltsin had good reason to be angry. For the second time in eight months, guerrillas from rebellious Chechnya had carried out a terrorist raid on a civilian hospital. This time the attack was in Kizlyar, a town in Dagestan, a multiethnic republic in the Russian Federation three miles from the Chechen border. After killing 25 local residents and policemen and holding more than 3,000 terrified civilians in the town's hospital for 24 hours...
...raid came as Yeltsin was attempting to strengthen his political position following a two-month recovery in a clinic and a convalescent center. The 64-year-old leader had started to make a round of high-profile appearances: strolling in the Kremlin, laying ceremonial bricks for a cathedral and praying at an Orthodox Christmas Mass. He even flew to Paris in the midst of the hostage crisis to attend the funeral of Francois Mitterrand and demonstrate his fitness for office. "I am in perfect health," he told reporters. "I came here so everyone could see I was in perfect form...
...bold reprise of the bloody raid on a Russian hospital in Budyonnovsk last June, hundreds of Chechen rebels seized a hospital in another Russian town, Kizlyar, taking more than 3,000 hostages and killing dozens more in the process. Demanding the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya, the rebels then took 165 hostages with them in an attempted escape to Chechnya. En route, however, Russian forces fired upon the rebels, who quickly captured a border village, creating a tense standoff half a mile from Chechnya...
...survived Thursday's attack on the town. By Russian President Boris Yeltsin's official body count, 137 of the 320 rebels remain unaccounted for. It's believed that many of them escaped through Russian lines during fierce fighting Thursday as hundreds of Chechens crossed into Dagestan in a daring raid to free the trapped rebels. Among those thought to have escaped: Salman Raduyev, commander of the rebel group. Just how many hostages were killed in the assault, and by whom, is still unclear. "Moscow now says there were 110 hostages, but journalists who worked in the area estimated their number...