President Of Kabardino-balkaria Denies Chechen Gunmen Can Be In Republic

President of Kabardino-Balkaria strongly denies that Chechen gunmen can be in the republic. "There are no grounds for a bandit group to operate unpunished and beyond control in our republic", he said Thursday in an interview with RIA Novosti. According to Kokov, the information that gunmen have "secret bases in Kabardino-Balkaria's mountainous regions" is from the "inventory of destabilizing the situation in the North Caucasus". The president of Kabardino-Balkaria said that the country's leaders know by names "the barely three hundred people who might share the bandits' ideas, including Wahabbism". He stressed at the same time that the country's leadership is capable to guarantee its people's security. Kokov acknowledges that a splash of terrorism took place in the republic in 1992 reminding that of Chechnya. But it was possibly that splash that mobilized the social consciousness, gave understanding that it was a fatal way, and allowed the authorities to undertake extraordinary measures to maintain stability and order. Kokov said that among those measures were a system of control on the republic's administrative and state borders, extra manning of police financed from the local budget. The president of Kabardino-Balkaria thinks that an important instrument of stabilization are special boards affiliated to administration heads which are made up in every village and include Islamic leaders.