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Medvedev visits restive Russian region after murder

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-06-10 13:48

MAKHACHKALA - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made a lightning visit to the volatile Dagestan region on Tuesday and said last week's murder of the region's Interior Minister was a challenge to Russian rule.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev takes aim as he visits the Federal Security Service (FSB) Special Task Center during his trip to Russia's southern region of Dagestan, June 9, 2009. [Agencies]

But hours after Medvedev ordered senior officials to step up their battle against a growing insurgency in the mainly Muslim region, a police officer was shot dead less than 30 km (18 miles) away, a police spokesman said.

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Dagestan, a patchwork of different ethnic groups that borders Chechnya, has been racked by a growing insurgency, and last week the local interior minister was shot dead by a sniper at a wedding celebration.

"This is a cynical challenge to the authorities, to the state," Medvedev told security officials on the outskirts of Makhachkala.

"Law-enforcement must do everything to quickly track down the criminals."

Medvedev warned officials that poverty, corruption and poor governance were threatening the stability of Dagestan.

"This extremism is being delivered from abroad when riff-raff of all kinds is coming to foul on our land," he said, in comments broadcast on all of Russia's main television channels.

After the meeting, the soft-spoken Medvedev, wearing a black sports jacket and sunglasses, inspected high-tech automatic weapons and spoke to commandos after they abseiled down a building amid explosions in an anti-terror drill.

About four hours after the meeting a special-forces officer was shot dead in a machine-gun attack near his home in the village of Tyube, north east of Makhachkala, police spokesman Mark Tolchinsky said.

One of the most populous regions in the mainly Muslim north Caucasus, Dagestan borders Chechnya, where Russia has fought two wars since the mid-1990s to crush Islamist separatists.

As security in Chechnya has improved, instability has worsened elsewhere in the region, where poverty and violence provide a fertile recruiting ground for militants and rebels.

Analysts say Moscow's fragile control over the north Caucasus could be undermined by the sharp economic downturn which threatens generous subsidies handed out by the Kremlin.

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