MOSCOW, May 2 (RIA Novosti) – Russian law enforcements have killed 73 alleged members of the Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus over the first three months of 2013, a police spokesman said.
Eighty-seven alleged militants were slain over the same period of 2012, police reported at the time.
Another 88 militants were detained in the first three months of 2013, and six others turned themselves in, the spokesman said Tuesday in the southern city of Pyatigorsk.
Last year, 133 suspected terrorists were arrested over the same period.
Law enforcement officers eliminated 26 militants’ hideouts and found 115 stashes with “tools of terror” in 2013, compared to last year’s tally of 24 and 59, respectively, the spokesman was cited as saying by the police department of the North Caucasus Federal District.
The report did not specify law enforcements’ losses, which stood at 57 dead over the first three months of last year.
Twenty-one servicemen were killed between January and March 2013, according to independent regional news website Kavkaz-uzel.ru, which also put militants’ losses at 83.
North Caucasus remains a hotbed of terrorist activity, the police spokesman admitted. Attacks continue in the region on an almost daily basis, especially in the republic of Dagestan, where a bomb went off in a police car Thursday, though no one was injured. Three policemen were shot dead in Dagestan by unidentified attackers Tuesday, and two teenagers were slain by a bomb in the republican capital Makhachkala the following day, though the latter attack was later blamed on racketeers, not militants.
