 Mayor shot dead in North Caucasus
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-27 07:46 The mayor of one of the biggest cities in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus region died from his wounds yesterday after gunmen attacked him in the street, prosecutors said. Vitaly Karayev, mayor of Vladikavkaz, is the most senior official to be killed for several years in the North Caucasus, a mountainous area on Russia's southern border where insurgents, some linked to militant Islam, mount regular attacks. "Today at about 9:00 am ... unknown individuals shot at the mayor of Vladikavkaz Vitaly Karayev," the investigative committee of the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office said in a statement. "Karayev died in hospital from the wounds he sustained." The statement said prosecutors had opened a murder investigation. Vladikavkaz is capital of North Ossetia, a mainly Christian region which has been caught up in a wave of violence that began with a separatist rebellion in nearby Chechnya in the 1990s and has since spread to neighboring regions. Twelve people were killed on Nov 6 when a suspected suicide bomber attacked a minibus as it pulled up outside a Vladikavkaz market. The town of Beslan, scene of a school siege in 2004 in which more than 300 people were killed, is in North Ossetia. Local people who said they had seen the attack told the cameraman Karayev was leaving his home on Kalinin Street and about to climb into his car when the shots were fired. Agencies (China Daily 11/27/2008 page12) |
