Mosque blasts in Grozny kills one, wounds one

In Grozny, when a group of men of the separate rifle battalion West under the federal Defence Ministry were leaving a mosque, explosions killed one contract soldier and wounded another, the Chechen Interior Ministry has told RIA Novosti.

The tragedy happened at 14:00, Moscow time, the day before in the Tamanskaya street in the Zavodskoi district. In preliminary information, two non-fragmentation bombs were blasted.

The post-blast engineering reconnaissance of the terrain revealed and extracted one more self-made bomb made from a 122-millimetre artillery shell.

Investigation is under way.

As reported by the RIA Novosti correspondent from Stavropol (centre of the Stavropol region adjacent to Chechnya), starting in August 2001 local courts have wound up proceedings on 552 criminal cases committed in Chechnya. From now on, such cases will be considered by Chechen courts in accordance with territorial jurisdiction, as provided for in the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure.

This information comes from the conference of judges of the Stavropol region held in the end of this week.